Re: Two Questions for the Board Candidates

[Andrea Veri <av gnome org>]

Hi Lefty,

2011/5/26 Lefty <lefty shugendo org>:
> 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?

I definitely not see this a problem (and I'm sure the Board will take
care of this issue as soon
as possible if it'll ever cause any real concern to the community), I
just think everyone should
be free to use whatever e-mail client, browser or $application he
feels comfortable to use
for his work or home usage. The world is nice because people do have
several and different opinions,
and the best thing to do is respect each other: no one should impose
or say what's better for me
(or you) to use, if you feel that a specific software fulfill your
needs, why would you change? :)

> 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...

I don't think setting up a mobile OS was one of the main priorities of the
GNOME Foundation over these two years and that's why we actually went
no where. Developing a mobile OS is becoming increasingly hard to achieve,
big companies like Apple or Google do put a lot of efforts and resources into
the mobile market and if we'll ever decide to compete with them with a
strong and
robust GNOME Mobile OS, I'll be there supporting the idea with my two
cents dreaming
of a GNOME boot logo on my mobile phone.

> Thanks for any responses.

Thank you for the nice questions!

cheers,

Andrea