Re: Questions for the board election candidates

[Andreas Nilsson <lists andreasn se>]

On 05/22/2012 09:58 AM, Robert Nordan wrote:
> 1) "Open Source" or "Free Software"? This is about personal 
> philosophy: Do you prefer the pragmatism of the Open Source Initiative 
> or the political idealism of the Free Software Foundation? (Some of 
> the candidates have already flagged a stance on this.)
I tend to say free software myself, but won't correct people who call it 
other things.
I am happy that FSF is part of the Adboard and the help and feedback 
they have given to the board over the years.

> 2) Overhaul of GNOME's git infrastructure I personally believe that 
> the way the GNOME git system is set up is a bit antiquated and doesn't 
> use git to its full potential. It's fine for developers with commit 
> access, but contributors without have to create individual patches and 
> attach them to bug trackers or convince the maintainers to look up 
> their personal branch hosted somewhere else and merge in. In a time 
> when GitHub is setting the standard for ease of use when it comes to 
> forking, merging and development, GNOME is lagging behind. I have 
> heard chatter among GNOME people about setting up a GNOME instance of 
> Gitorious to gain that kind of functionality, but nothing has really 
> happened. Do any of the candidates want to make a juicy campaign 
> promise on this issue?
As far as I've understood, setting up Gitorious is a bit of work, so 
that leaves us the option of A. Taking away sysadmin time from other 
things or, B. Pay the Gitorious people to do it. Time and money could 
probably be better spent on other things, but I think it's at least 
worth to investigate it.

> 3) GNOME and Ubuntu In the recent years there has been a public 
> perception of a schism between GNOME and Ubuntu resulting in double 
> work and wasted resources on both sides. Do you think that perception 
> is unfounded or not, and how do you plan to handle it? 
I'm not sure I agree it's wasted resources. It's always great that 
projects try out different things, especially if those projects are 
focused on what attracted me about GNOME when I first joined the 
project: Software freedom and making hard choices. I think a large part 
of the schism is because Ubuntu was once what Debian or SUSE is today, 
just a loose collection of packages (although they actually made a hard 
decision about what DE to ship at the time; GNOME), but is nowadays 
increasingly building a distinct product by making hard choices, just 
like is GNOME is these days too.
Both projects do share a lot of components though, and bringing the 
relevant developers to the right hackfests and conferences is a good way 
to develop those components.

> 4) Stance on GNOME forks Similarly, GNOME 3 has met with some opposing 
> developments like Cinnamon and MATE. It is of course the right of 
> dissatisfied users to do what they want and fork if they like, but 
> should GNOME ignore them or try to find ways to work together with them? 
We're building GNOME and I would like to focus on that. It's great that 
people fork and try out other paths, but I don't feel I have time to pay 
any attention to those projects specifically.

- Andreas