Re: Foundation summary

[Bart Decrem <bart eazel com>]

Havoc Pennington wrote:

> In the past, if a company has wanted to work with GNOME, they've
> approached one or more of the GNOME companies. That company tries to
> give them a guess what the community will want to do, but the
> community doesn't know about the company. With Eazel, people at
> companies knew about it months in advance of anyone else, and had to
> guide Eazel and give them advice.
>
> The foundation lets the community get in on this process, because we
> can have community members on the board, and the board can talk to
> companies. It's better than the current situation; at least your
> representatives will be elected.

Exactly.  In my opinion the proposed foundation will be a huge increase in
openness and accountability.  The honest reality is that up until now, any
corporation who's interested in Gnome would deal with people at Helix or Red
Hat or Eazel.  For example, Eazel was created several months before we were
comfortable announcing ourselves to the world and putting our source code in
Gnome CVS.  So we went directly to Miguel and, later, to the Red Hat folks
and dealt with them.  We needed a confidential forum to get to know the Gnome
community and get advice on how to join the community.  This is not a very
open model for engaging the world, and it certainly doesn't contain the
influence of corporate interests.

For Gnome to achieve its goal of being a real alternative desktop environment
to the Windows desktop, we're going to need plenty of corporate support, such
as Sun's announcement to open source StarOffice and incorporate core Gnome
technologies.  The trick will be to encourage corporate involvement, and
offer a forum for corporations to communicate with the Gnome community, but
to do so in a way that limits their influence and keeps the real power with
the Gnome hackers.  I believe that the proposed structure is the best way to
achieve this balance.

Bart