Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates

["Diego Escalante Urrelo" <diegoe gnome org>]

On 12/1/07, Philip Van Hoof <pvanhoof gnome org> wrote:
>
> On Sat, 2007-12-01 at 10:18 +0000, Diego Escalante Urrelo wrote:
> > On 12/1/07, Dave Neary <bolsh gnome org> wrote:
>
> > Doing that quality control could eat some (human) resources. Also as
> > John says this could easily lead to an unintentioned favouritism.
>
> Unintentioned favouritism is a cheap reason to avoid all innovation from
> now on:
>

No, you are misinterpretaing my words, it's quite different to talk
about choosing GPL over $something-else and choosing place-X over
place-Y.
On the current context, choosing to endorse place-X's training courses
would imply that we are helping them make profit. Choosing GPL or
supporting ODF is a totally different matter.

> o. Let's start with our license: I think that picking the GPL license
>    implies an unintentioned favouritism for GNU.
>
> o. We should also not support ODF, because that implies an unintentioned
>    favouritism for a company called Sun, and also for Novell!
>
> Please feel the sarcasm.
>
> If we are going to try to stop expressing any form of unintentioned
> favouritism, we might as well just stop at all.
>
>
> > The cons would outweight the benefits, I think we would get a lot of
> > free problems from stuff like this.
>
> Name one that any one of our technology decisions doesn't have,
>
> My project creates opinions from people who prefer MAPI over IMAP, web
> clients over normal E-mail, XMPP over SMTP, ...
>

Different matter, I don't think Tinymail could be a source of the same
type of problems I'm thinking of.
To clarify, I'm thinking more about the social implicances of such
decision, lots of people would think we are discriminating some and
favouring others, among other things.
The quality of what we endorse also worries me a lot, we can try
really hard to watch over the quality of the courses or training but
it's impossible to guarantee 100% quality, hence we would end with
people having "papers" that have our sign saying "yes, this guy knows
how to hack GNOME stuff" and they don't necessarily would even know
how to apt-get something.

> Lot's of free problems.
>
> Realism!
>
> > I imagine fountains of FUD on
> > every corner.
>
> That's unavoidable for "anything" we do.

Nope, I don't think nobody has raised any kind of FUD about a lot of
things we do. As an example, let's take Boston Summit: nobody accuses
us of favouring Boston because it's just a hacker meeting, no one is
making money with it directly.