Re: Candidacy (Michael Meeks), I'm totaly misunderstood <sob>

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Michael Meeks <michael helixcode com> writes:   
>         I'd like to point out that Bart did not enter into my original
> mail. I was more targeting the "I ask hard questions" and "I'll keep
> the board honest" promises.
>   
>         It would seem to me obvious that Bart as a "Father of the
> Foundation" figure should be intimately involved with the setting
> up, administration and legal issues of the foundation. I don't think
> we could go much further without him.
>   

I think you need to distinguish someone like Bart from someone who's
just an "advocate" or "loyal fan" or whatever.

Bart has genuinely done a lot of work for the GNOME Project,
participates in the important GNOME forums, knows the GNOME people. He
is as far as I'm concerned a member of the project and does productive
tasks; every bit as productive as writing docs, translations, code,
etc. The fact that these tasks don't result in something checked in to
CVS is not relevant. They are important tasks that needed to get done.

So what I would say is, yes I agree with you with respect to some of
the candidates so far, because they are not GNOME contributors. But I
think the crucial difference between those candidates and Bart is that
Bart is a GNOME contributor, but still doesn't meet your definition of
"hacker" as far as I can tell.

i.e. anyone who's an active participant in GNOME, with a personal
investment of time and energy and so on in the project, is a totally
reasonable candidate IMO. There's no reason to say "sorry Bart, your
contribution isn't a module in CVS, so it wasn't a contribution."

I think this difference between Bart and the other candidates you may
have been referring to is the reason followup posts were about
Bart. Because you seem to be lumping him in with some noncontributors
by saying "only this arbitrary group of technical contributions
actually count as contributions."

Havoc