Re: Can we improve things?

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad behdad org>]

Hi Damien,

The problems you raise are real, and not unknown to the community and
the foundation board at all.  However, I'm not sure who you have in mind
when you say " am more and more disappointed by the way some people
*control* that community, even if they never contributed anything back
to it."

The problem in short is, we don't have enough people working on our
infrastructure.  Both this and the planet issue are currently being
discussed in the board.  That doesn't keep others from suggesting
possible resolutions here or to the board-list.

Regards,

behdad


On Thu, 2007-09-06 at 23:19 +0200, Damien Sandras wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> As a long time contributor to the GNOME project, I will take the freedom
> to directly mail the foundation about the current problems I experience
> in the GNOME community.
> 
> You probably know that I started contributing to GNOME in my spare time
> back in 2000. I have dedicated countless hours to my project,
> GnomeMeeting, now known as Ekiga. It means 7 years of development,
> exclusively done during evenings, nights and week-ends. Ekiga was
> the first videoconferencing application available for the Linux desktop,
> and it is nowadays still one of the best Open Source SIP softphones.
> 
> I have always believed in GNOME and in its community, that is the only
> way that can motivate you coding that much and that long.
> 
> However, I am more and more disappointed by the way some people
> *control* that community, even if they never contributed anything back
> to it.
> 
> When I think to Matthias, I am getting mad. 
> Matthias requested an SVN account several months ago, and never got one.
> When he went on IRC to ask for the account activation, people replied to
> him that he had to make a new request and wait. One month later, the
> account is not active yet. Matthias has been contributing thousands of
> lines of code to Ekiga since several months, and I still need to commit
> his patches myself. This is inadmissible.
> 
> When I think to Julien, I am also getting mad.
> He has been contributing to Ekiga for 5 years. He recently created a
> blog and asked to Jeff to be added on planet.gnome.org. He was first
> ignored, then Jeff told him that he had to post often to be added. 
> One day later, another guy was added to planet.gnome.org with 3 posts
> having been done in a 6 months period. That is what I call dictatorship
> and boycott of my project.
> 
> This kind of behavior makes me more and more disappointed about the way
> things are being handled in GNOME and I am about to move my whole stuff
> to sourceforge.net and go on my own way.
> 
> By the way, I do not want this thread to degenerate into a flamewar,
> that is the reason why I will not answer any mail related to the thread
> I created. I do not want either to offend the 99% of people who are
> doing a great job, I sincerely thank them for their work (you know who
> you are).
> 
> I just wanted to express my opinion, in the hope that something can be
> done to improve the situation.
-- 
behdad
http://behdad.org/

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little
 Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
        -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759