Re: Two Questions for the Board Candidates

[Stormy Peters <stormy gnome org>]

On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 11:38 AM, Lefty <lefty shugendo org> wrote:

First: Since the issue of "divisive attitude[s] such as Richard sometimes seems to [promote?] when he talks about 'GNU/Linux'" came up, I'd be interested to know what, if anything, candidates for the Board propose to do to address the ongoing waste of time and energy in the community over trivia like "Linux" versus "GNU/Linux", "free" versus "open source", and the like. This extends to things like "litmus tests" on mailing lists derailing discussions into observations about which email clients or operating systems participants might be using at the time they post, for example.

I have taken an active role in moderating. I've sent private and public emails.

Attempts to divide the community and delegitimize individuals and their viewpoints are common, and becoming increasingly so in the past few years. Bad feelings have driven many away from the level of involvement in the community they've previously had. Do candidates see this as a problem? Do they have any proposals for addressing it?

I don't think people are trying to divide the community. I do think on mailing lists we don't all always have the best communication or attitudes but I think everyone is trying to do what they think is best.

Second: Do candidates have any view as to how the disastrous attempts at engagement by GNOME with the mobile space might be improved on? The "GNOME Mobile and Embedded Initiative" went nowhere, and arguably handed the mobile device space to Google and Android by forfeit. Since that time, there have been various attempts to get community-based, mainstream open source onto mobile devices, all of which have pretty much died. The sole remaining effort seems to be MeeGo, and GNOME has no apparent direct involvement there.

I think we need to come to agreement on what we want GNOME to be. I think the problem is that we had the desktop/technologies on one side and the mobile group on the other side. We need to all be working together on a common vision. There can still be a mobile mailing list but the technical discussions need to happen in the right project mailing lists and all the groups represented in the mobile mailing lists need to be part of those technical discussions. And we need a vision we can communicate to all the mobile players.

I think the board can help drive the vision discussions with the community, the organizations that have been a part of GNOME for a long time and the new organizations that we'd like to work with.

Stormy