Re: Additional questions for the board candidates

[Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org>]

On mer, 2005-11-23 at 18:56 +0100, Philip Van Hoof wrote:
[...]
> 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.

"steering the releases" is really delegated to the release team, who is
trying hard to delegate this more to the whole community :-)

> 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?

Desktop standards are important. However, I don't feel that as a board
member, I should push the developers to cooperate even more with
freedesktop.org.

First, I'm not sure what this would mean (we already cooperate a
lot :-)), and as a second point, the one who is doing work is the one
taking decisions. If the developer don't want to use a freedesktop.org
spec, there are probably some good reasons for this.

I obviously don't dislike freedesktop.org, since it has brought us a lot
of good things. And I think we're doing quite well with freedesktop.org.
Is there any problem I'm not aware of?

> 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)?

Of course KDE people are welcome to our conferences: everyone is
welcome, AFAIK. Paying their travel might not be possible, though: I'm
pretty sure we can't pay the travel for everyone who we'd like to see.
But it can happens if we invite someone from another project (like KDE).

Having a KDE developer talk at GUADEC... Well, why not? If it's on
topic, yes. And the opposite is true.

I'm not sure I get your question, though. We've been open with KDE since
a long time, and we cooperate with them when possible. We don't
disregard their work (although we may think they're doing the things
right, but that's why we're contributing to GNOME and not to KDE...).

> 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?

So, I'm starting to be worried: do you really see so many problems in
GNOME? Are other people thinking the same way?

I don't think we have a problem of leadership. If there's a good
technology that we should use, we use it. What you might see is that it
takes time for us to do so, but I think it's because we're a big
project. Let's take another example: the recent performance work.
Federico started working on performance, and he was joined by some other
people. Did we need a strong leader saying "we should do this!!!"? No,
we got someone (Federico), who's launched a good initiative. I believe
in this: at some time, we get some leaders in specific fields.

I don't think the board is the appropriate place to take technical
decisions (board members are not supposed to know a lot of technical
stuff). However, it can try to help reach a consensus if this is really
needed.

About the python, C#, java stuff: we have official bindings for python
and java, so those are supported. I hope we'll have official bindings
for C# soon too. I don't see the "is it supported?" issue. However,
there's the "do we accept a C#/Java/Python module in core GNOME?" issue.
We all agreed that python was okay.

> 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?

We should first know what will be needed for this laptop, in terms of
software. Will our technologies be usable for this? I hope.

So, the main thing to do here is to have someone talking with the people
involved in the project. It seems like Jeff is already doing a good job
for this :-)

Vincent

-- 
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