Re: Candidacy Nomination - John Heard

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel helixcode com>]

Hello Members of the GNOME project,

   I would like to encourage people to vote for John for the Board of
   Directors of the GNOME Foundation.  

   I am encouraging people, because John is a new face in the
   project, and he was the key person inside Sun that was working on
   their new desktop strategy that leads to Sun announcing the
   adoption of GNOME inside Sun.

   Sun has been working with the maintainers of various GNOME modules
   as regular contributors, but you do not see them very often on the
   mailing lists, so it might be hard to judge from their public
   visibility their contributions.

   But if you pay close attention, you will see that Sun has been
   already doing some progress:

	* They have contributed to the code base that will ship with
	  GNOME 1.4 (for instance, the fast Berkeley DB-based GConf
	  backend).

	* A thorough test suite for Nautilus, the GNOME 1.4 file
          manager.

	* They have been working on improving the documentation,
          together with the GDP project.

	* Their input has been very valuable for making a word class
          UI handler code in Bonobo.

	* They recently announced OpenOffice, and they are going to be
          integrating OpenOffice with GNOME by using Gtk+ and Bonobo
          (as you could see from John's post).  One of the goals of
          both communities right now is to work in a middle ground to
          have a standard component system based on Bonobo and the
          OpenOffice UNO component system.

	* The have done security checking of various GNOME modules
          (and indeed gnome libs 1.2.9 will contain a 

   They are trying hard to blend with the software community, but this
   is a slow process, as they are teaching their hackers to work in an
   unusual way (I know, because when I visited them in Germany, many
   hackers were not there, because they were at a Collab.Net seminar
   on Open Source).  

   The simple message is: Sun is taking GNOME very seriously, and they
   are doing serious work toward extending the GNOME free software
   pool.

   John is a great person to work together at a personal level, and it
   would be only benefical for the board of directors to have him
   there.

Best wishes,
Miguel.