Additional questions for the board candidates

[Philip Van Hoof <pvanhoof gnome org>]

Some additional questions for the board candidates.


As you guys will also represent the developers behind the GNOME desktop.
I have a few questions coming from such a developer. Not that I'm a big
contributor. But I'm guessing that, like me, are many of the people in
the GNOME development team (whether or not it's really "a team" is
questionable, of course). I can imagine non-developers who contribute to
the GNOME platform will have similar questions for you guys. I hope I
inspire them to start throwing questions.

I'll first start with reflecting the publicised goals of the GNOME
Foundation. 

	"
The GNOME Foundation will work to further the goal of the GNOME project:
to create a computing platform for use by the general public that is
completely free software.

To achieve this goal, the Foundation will coordinate releases of GNOME
and determine which projects are part of GNOME. The Foundation will act
as an official voice for the GNOME project, providing a means of
communication with the press and with commercial and noncommercial
organizations interested in GNOME software. The foundation may produce
educational materials and documentation to help the public learn about
GNOME software. In addition, it may sponsor GNOME-related technical
conferences, and represent GNOME at relevant conferences sponsored by
others, help create technical standards for the project and promote the
use and development of GNOME software.
	"


So basically you guys will be responsible for being the official voice,
steering the releases, communicating with vendors and customers, GNOME
related conferences and promotion.

I know my questions are not very related to "promotion". Most of them
are related to the "official voice" and the "communication with
commercial and noncommercial organizations" part of the text.

First question:

How important are desktop standards for you. How will you attempt to let
the GNOME developers cooperate even more with the freedesktop.org
movement? Or do you dislike that movement? In in general: What should
GNOME "do" with fd.org?

Second question:

What will you do to further enhance cooperation with the KDE developers?
Will you invite them to our conferences? Will you pay their travel
expenses? Will you let them talk on GUADEC? Will you visit their
conferences and will you do a talk about cooperation at their
conferences? Or will you simply disregard them and think GNOME is
superior yadiyada (in which case I wont vote for you, by the way)?

Third question:

In my opinion, GNOME lacks strong leadership that steers development
choices and standards. We have no Linus Torvalds (oh I forget a lot
important kernel developers of today, it's not the point -- I picked the
most famous one and everybody knows this guy and understands his role as
a kernel developer, right?).

It's getting increasingly hard for a novice desktop developer to know
which desktop standard will succeed and which will not. It's getting
increasingly difficult to achieve getting things that will influence
other components done. Amongst them are clipboard standards and
infrastructure, configuration standards and infrastructure, desktop
(presence) notification but also programming environments and languages
like C#, Python and Java and the language bindings (which ones belong in
the 'official' GNOME distribution -- for commercial software developers
this is an extremely important question: Do we support .NET or we don't?
Do we support Java or we don't? There's no clarity).

And D-BUS is moving forward rapidly. This will introduce a lot new such
standards. Even D-BUS itself is such a standard of which it hasn't been
said that it's "the" IPC for a typical modern GNOME application. Or is
it ORBit-2? D-COP? I guess nobody knows.

Yet there's no real leadership telling the GNOME app developers what
direction to go. And there's many questions and even more exciting new
technologies being developed today. A very interesting such technology
is Galago (desktop notification specification). There's many others (and
I'm not going to list all of them just to please their developers). And
it's growing rapidly in numbers.

I can imagine companies that would like to target the GNOME desktop,
while developing solutions for their customers, would like this type of
leadership to happen. Yet I can imagine a lot Free Software GNOME
developers dislike "any" form of "leadership". It's not a simple problem
to solve. Will the GNOME Foundation fill this gap? Or will the GNOME
Foundation create a solution? How will you, provided you become board
member, address this. Or isn't this important enough for the Board to
discuss? Or isn't it the focus of the Board?

Fourth question (finally a non programmer question! :p):

Because I can imagine it's going to be an important project for the
GNOME desktop and infrastructure, how will you involve yourself in the
One Laptop Per Child concept?



-- 
Philip Van Hoof, software developer at x-tend
home: me at pvanhoof dot be
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org
work: vanhoof at x-tend dot be
http://www.pvanhoof.be - http://www.x-tend.be