Re: Candidacy: Lionel Dricot

[Martyn Russell <martyn lanedo com>]

On 23/05/11 15:08, Dodji Seketeli wrote:
> Martyn Russell<martyn lanedo com>  a écrit:
>
> > That's always needed too of course, but when you have potential
> > customers asking who can provide support for projects X, Y and Z, do
> > you really want to be in a position where you have no answer?
>
> Oh, you mean when a potential customer comes to the /Foundation Board/,
> asking that question?

Indeed.

> I didn't understand it that way.  Sorry to ask a question as a reply,

No problem at all ;)

> but does that happen already?  If yes, how did the board handle it so
> far?

Yes, I believe so, perhaps Vincent can best comment here.

> > IMO it also means the customer may suffer because they either can't
> > find the support they're looking for or the wrong support from someone
> > else.
> >
> > > We are a non-profit organisation with limited resources.  Communicating
> > > around the commercial offering of /one/ company can be a
> > > non-straightforward exercise, when you want to do it right.  Even more
> > > for the commercial offerings of /several/ companies.  Do we really want
> > > to take that route?
> >
> > Yes I believe we do, when people are choosing opposing toolkits
> > because it appears as if GTK+ has no commercial support, that's a lack
> > of communication IMO.
>
> Let's talk about specifics.  Did the clients choose e.g, Qt because KDE
> e.V markets Trolltech's offerings or, do they do so because Trolltech is
> better at communicating?

Well, the situation is different there in the sense that there is 
already a company behind Qt for customers to go to. There are many 
behind GTK+ and no one place to go to. This is part of the issue IMO.

From what I heard recently, a customer did choose Qt for these sort of 
reasons (from recent board notes):

"""
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.
"""

You could also say they do a better job of communicating yes, as a 
minimum they have a website to help people find what they're looking for:

  http://qt.nokia.com/partners

and more specifically:

  http://qt.nokia.com/partners/partner-locator

> > What are your concerns about communicating GNOME's commercial
> > offerings?
>
> My concern is that we'd try to address a real issue at a wrong level
> and, incidentally, turning what should be a place to set and nurture a
> vendor-neutral level playing field into a place uselessly cluttered by
> vendors' ads.

Ah I see. That indeed would be horrid. I think the links above 
illustrate how it would be better than what we have now.

> I guess if what you want is just to maintain a web page of companies who
> have something to sell around our "stack", I wouldn't have much concern.
> But then I am not sure you need to be on the board for that.

Well, because companies (from what I have seen last GUADEC) come to the 
board members about working with GNOME technologies (Vincent can comment 
here I believe).

> Of course I assume you mean well.  I am just not convinced about the
> efficiency of for-profit entities delegating their marketing to
> non-profits.

I can understand that and we certainly mean well.

It's really born out of frustration when seeing companies move away from 
projects we have deep involvement in to others by reasons of poor 
communication (as I see it).

--
Regards,
Martyn