Re: What is GNOME office?

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Alan Cox <alan lxorguk ukuu org uk> writes: 
> It is inappropriate for the gnome foundation to dictate what is 'official'.
> It has no mandate for this. 

It does - the charter says the foundation should decide what is and
isn't called "GNOME." This doesn't mean the board will just dictate
that; it means the board will help get a decision made and
communicated. And that's what we're doing - we're discussing it on
this list to get an idea what people think.

Even so, I don't think any decision will be made/communicated for
several months, because we'll need a lot more information than we have
now.

> It is even more inappropriate if it tries to
> force people to contribute to projects that have non-free strings
> attached.

I object to the use of "force" here. There is no coercive power
available to anyone. If there are strong objections to the license
issue - and it seems clear that there are, as there were for
Netscape's NPL initially - we are going to have to address the license
issue. No one has the power to overrule the community consensus or
even the community substantial-minority-view.

Alan, read the responses from board members, they are mostly agreeing
with the community not with Sun. Don't get all adversarial for no good
reason. We share the same goals. There is no possibility of force, and
no decision on this matter is likely until there's a pretty obvious
route. When there is a decision it will be community-driven.

I hereby resolve to flame anyone using the word "force" when no force
exists. ;-)

Havoc