Re: Two Questions for the Board Candidates

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Thu, 2011-05-26 at 10:38 -0700, Lefty 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.
> 
> 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?

If you have particular examples to go with this, I'm sure the Foundation
Board could look into this, but I haven't seen any ostracism in our
community that wasn't in part brought by the person who ended up being
shunned.

> 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.
> 
> Do candidates have any thoughts on the future of GNOME with respect to
> the mobile space? It's the fastest-growing portion of the general
> computing device market, and the main platform choices are proprietary
> or as good as. One of the issues raised by Canonical with respect to
> the GNOME 3 shell for Ubuntu was that it wasn't felt to be as
> appropriate for tablets and the like as Unity...

GNOME mobile was never going to be _a_ product, as we didn't not build a
phone UI, and probably won't for a while still. We should re-target the
marketing effort as a way to show off our technologies.

As for tablets, I seriously doubt Unity is any more ready to handle
tablets than GNOME 3 is, whether at the bottom or at the top of the
stacks. Effort is under way, and I'm sure we'll all be happy when a more
complete solution is available. That ends up being a technical problem
though, rather than one for the GNOME Foundation to handle. I expect the
GNOME Foundation to support those efforts adequately.

Cheers