Re: Meeting Minutes Published - March 29th, 2011

[Martyn Russell <martyn lanedo com>]

Hi all,

On 12/04/11 03:00, Brian Cameron wrote:
> The meeting minutes for the March 29th GNOME Foundation board
> meeting is now published. Refer here:
>
> http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes/20110329
>
> Other past board meetings are archived here:
>
> http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/Minutes
>
> -- text of the latest minutes follows --
>
> Minutes for Meeting of March 29th, 2011

Thank you for the minutes Brian.

> * Johannes Schmid informed the board that at the Toronto hackfest
> that they discussed about an organization that decided to use Qt
> instead of GTK+ mainly because they were able to get a support
> contract for Qt. Therefore we thought it might be a good idea to
> give interested companies a chance to present themselves as
> commercial support options on developer.gnome.org. Perhaps via
> some "Get support" link. Do we have any response?
> o ACTION: Andreas - Will discuss with Ryan Lortie providing
> support contracts for GTK+.

Can I ask why the ACTION above says you will discuss with Ryan about
providing support contracts for GTK+? Why not a mailing list with
companies that have GTK+ or GLib core maintainers (perhaps GNOME in
general even)?

How this looks to us and potentially other companies involved in GTK+:

1. Ryan is not representative of all companies out there offering
services around the GTK+ stack and it is a conflict of interest to
involve just him (what of Collabora, Openismus, Igalia, Lanedo and
perhaps even others)?

2. Ryan maintains GLib mostly not GTK+. If it's about GTK+, why not
Matthias or someone completely detached and neutral?

3. Ryan has also not been maintaining GLib for as long as some other
maintainers in the GNOME ecosystem.

--

For those who are unaware of Lanedo's involvement with GNOME and GTK+ in
particular, here is a quick summary.

We've been involved in the GLib/GTK+ since 2005 (as a company) and been
pushing it in a number of ways:

- We have professionally offered services to Samsung and Nokia since
  2005 for GTK+, I'm sure Lanedo is not alone in this too.
- We have GNOME 3 and GTK+ 3 now, which is (IMO) largely down to Micke
  Hallendal (then leading Imendio) pushing the idea a few years back
  at GUADEC (though discussions that were not so public).
- Free propaganda through the Berlin hackfest t-shirts, stickers and
  tattoos in Istanbul, etc.

etc.

--

We told Stormy last year at GUADEC that we really need a forum or way
for potential customers to contact businesses around GNOME and get
support for the GNOME stack. We have seen first hand how companies have
offered services when they don't have the expertise and subsequently
frightened off larger corporations as a result. We want to avoid this too.

Please can we have some open forum about this instead of expecting one
person in the community who isn't representative of all companies with
maintainers in those areas, being contacted?

--
Regards,
Martyn