Re: Some comments

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

"Almer S. Tigelaar" <almer1@dds.nl> writes:

> One thing :
> 
> > On certain occasions, conversations within the Gnome Foundation will be
> > confidential. On those occasions, notes from meetings etc. may be edited
> > to maintain confidentiality. We will work to keep confidential
> > conversations down to a minimum.
> 
> I am wondering what you mean hear with 'confidential'? I get the nasty
> feeling this is more or less a loophole to make decisions behind other
> people's back or something which is not a good thing.
> Maybe someone could give a concrete example and more clearly define 
> 'certain occasions'?

Hi,

Well, one example (I only heart about this since I'm not in the current
steering committee myself, but maybe it's good to hear this from someone
who's not in the steercom as well):

Sometimes companies - like for instance Eazel before they decided to join
the GNOME Project - want to confidentally talk to a representative of
"The GNOME Project".

In most cases, this happens when a company basically wants to invest in
GNOME, but they're not yet absolutely sure about this and they want to talk
with us about this first.

Especially companies which previously focused on proprietary software tend
to have inhibitions against supporting a Free Software project - you need
to understand their point of view: if they only did proprietary software
before then - according to their point of view - all other software companies
and basically everyone who develops any software are there opponents
(that's what it is when you develop proprietary software).

Because of this they often don't want to talk about their plans to move to
Free Software in public.

However, if they can confidentally talk with us, we may be able to convince
them that it's a good thing to develop Free Software and we may even convice
them to support the GNOME Project.

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