Re: My views

[Martin Baulig <martin home-of-linux org>]

Hassan Aurag <aurag@CRM.UMontreal.CA> writes:

>  I have read some of what was posted. Here are my views.
> 
>  The only way such a foundation would work is to become a gnome-only
> sourceforge kindda thing.

Well, I think to disagree a bit - well, not only a bit.

In my oppinion, if the GNOME Foundation will only do what you proposed,
then we don't need it at all.

>  -Compile farms,
>  -Test machines. Log onto a sparc or mainframe or IA64, compile, run
> and debug.

That's not what we need a political institution like the GNOME Foundation
for, this can be done by any commercial company - and it can even be done
much better.

The GNOME Foundation is our political representation of the whole GNOME
Project and its main purpose is

- to give people the feeling of a community, that they're represented
  in the GNOME Foundation as community and that they can also influence
  the future of this community

- to officially represent the GNOME community in the public

- to make decisions which are important for the project, such as for
  instance when/how to make releases, to which shows to go etc.

- to be a contact point for people from outside of the GNOME Project who
  want to talk with the project or who are even interested in joining
  the project

Just to mention a few of them.

>  People's biggest fear is "who is gonna control this thing?"

The GNOME Foundation, that is, the people of the community.

>  I agree with that fear too. So we must add full-blown serious
> transparent "net democracy" thinggy.
> 
>  I also agree with other posters that no money should be given to
> anyone except to enhance the foundation as a community thing. Add
> machines, software to a future GnomeForge.

Please keep in mind that the GNOME Project not only consists of machines
and compilations.

There are many other good things we may want to spend money for, just
to mention a few of them:

- marketing stuff: make GNOME CDs, flyers etc. to be distributed at
  shows.

- let people go to shows and give talks about GNOME and the idea of
  Free Software

- hire developers to do stuff which is important for the project but
  for which you can't find any volunteer

- organize meetings of the GNOME community, such as for instance GUADEC.

-- 
Martin Baulig
martin@gnome.org (private)
baulig@suse.de (work)