Re: Additional questions for the board candidates

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad cs toronto edu>]

On Wed, 23 Nov 2005, Philip Van Hoof wrote:

> 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?

I strongly support standards in general, and fd.o in particular.
But I also believe that if a standard is the right one, GNOME
developers will pick it up automatically.  No need to push that.
About what should GNOME do with fd.o, I guess fd.o is no one
other than GNOME, KDE, and a few others.  So basically GNOME is
partly fd.o.


> 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)?

We are already cooperating with KDE developers in various
aspects.  I know I'm doing myself.  I will invite them to our
conferences, yes.  They are welcome to submit as many talk
proposals as they want, and I'm generally positive about
accepting them.  I do not follow KDE news personally, but now I
think maybe I should reald Planet KDE.  It's KDE that we can copy
from without any legal problems after all!


> 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?


Some of the issues you raise, like D-BUS, are making a healthy
progress in GNOME IMO.  It's a matter of time and resources
before we get it replace all our IPC.

Other ones, like the status of Mono in the project, is exactly
the kind of thing that the board needs to ensure is resolved.
Note that I said "the board needs to ensure is resolved", not
that "the board should resolve".  The FSF may be very helful in
resolving the legal issues, should we ask them.


> 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?

Yes, it's an important project for GNOME, and GNOME in general
benefits from this involvement in all aspects.  Other than all
the publicity that GNOME can gain from OLPC, I think getting our
software to run on a restricted environment like the green
machine is a huge improvement on our performance.  Without
becoming too technical, I like working on that direction.  As for
how to get myself involved, for now I'm trusting Jim Gettys as
GNOME's contact to the project.


--behdad
http://behdad.org/

"Commandment Three says Do Not Kill, Amendment Two says Blood Will Spill"
	-- Dan Bern, "New American Language"