Re: Foundation summary

[Mike Kestner <mkestner ameritech net>]

Bart Decrem wrote:

> But one thing that was kind of weird was that Miguel, Federico and the RHAD guys
> offered to help us, and gave us a preview of how the Gnome community would respond
> to our announcement, but they were really in no position to represent Gnome.

The co-founders and the single most significant corporate sponsor of
Gnome were in no position to represent Gnome?  I disagree.  

Based on your description, it sounds like the board will primarily be
serving as free software evangelists from a gnome standpoint.  I hope
that potential board members understand this is their primary role
before they choose to accept the prestige associated with the post. 
This requires a special skill set that most of us don't possess.
 
> I'm not sure if you've followed the recent OpenOffice announcement by Sun, but Sun
> is basically GPL'ing 6 million lines of code and rewriting OpenOffice on top of
> GTK, Bonobo and other core Gnome technologies.  This is a huge step forward for
> free software and, in my opinion, the most important boost to free software since
> the Mozilla announcement.  

Without starting any flamewars over the importance of this, or for that
matter Mozilla, I think the value of the StarOffice release remains to
be seen.  I'm reserving judgement until I get a look at the code and see
their commitment to it going forward.  Your comment about abandoning C++
is an interesting one related to Eazel's integration with Gnome.  We are
talking about 6 Million lines of C++ code here, right?  Not that I think
that's a huge issue as long as it's 6 million lines of good C++ code.
  
It's also interesting to note that Sun was able to obtain enough of a
comfort level for free software without access to a Gnome foundation.  I
still think that companies will always feel more comfortable discussing
these types of decisions with other companies.

Mike