Re: Money spending, questions for the candidates

["John (J5) Palmieri" <johnp redhat com>]

On Sat, 2007-12-01 at 12:15 +0100, Philip Van Hoof 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:
> 
> 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.

This is a completely straw man argument Philip.  By restricting
competition through favoritism we actually kill innovation.  There are
times when we will endorse already dominant ideologies that are in-line
with our own and reject those that are dangerous, but I have never seen
the board stray from our partner neutrality by pushing for something
that hasn't already proved itself.  i.e The board isn't going to come up
with its own license and office format and push those as the one true
way of doing things.  To that effect if a company is interested or
individuals wanted to put together a training program they could come to
us and request we overview the course for endorsement and rights to use
our trademarks.  

There are always these details to consider and there are consequences to
even the smallest detail.  I'm going to call you out here.  You come to
us with a set of questions which I can sum up to - If elected will you
get the board to fund my pet projects?  I'll give you this Philip, you
have some nice high level ideas.  What you lack is the details to get
there - the step by step map that considers all the consequences and
routes around them.  

I learned a great deal about this when I went to speak to Representative
Barney Frank.  I was helping push the Education For All Act which would
provide US aid funding for a basic level of education to children around
the world.  Representative Frank turned around and said that all sounds
really good but how do we get there?  Where do the funds come from?
What is your plan?  Lesson learned - it is all about how you get there
and not just the end results.

If a project is worthwhile it will prove itself by getting itself off
the ground and be able to sustain itself.  The foundation comes in when
such projects need a little push to get to the next level.  A project
should not rely solely on the Foundation because, lets face it, our
resources are limited and there are a number of good project out there
that could use our help.  We are going to go for the ones that have a
high probability of success and give us the biggest bang for our buck.
 
-- 
John (J5) Palmieri <johnp redhat com>