Re: Board of Directors Elections 2014 - Candidacy - Emily Gonyer

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Wed, 2014-05-21 at 07:24 -0400, Emily Gonyer wrote:
> Yes, you're part of the community. But you're being paid by a large
> corporation to work on it, and as a result are beholden to them at
> least as much as to the rest of the community. Red Hat is not the only
> thing that matters in the GNOME world. Or, it shouldn't be.

Why do you think it is the only thing that matters? What gives you that
impression?

>  But for
> the last several years, Red Hat's wants/needs have trumped what anyone
> else wants/needs,

Are you saying that Red Hat employees mostly worked on features that Red
Hat thought were important to GNOME? That's hardly a surprise, but I'd
be interested to know why you think it should it be any different.

If you refer to particular technical decisions, such as our shift
towards systemd, I think the events of recent months have proven us
right. If you're talking about some new features that might appear
useless to you, note that there will always be others for which those
features are important. (I've actually read that people thought the
Wacom tablet integration wasn't something we should have been working
on. Turns out we now have the best Wacom integration across any
platform, even proprietary ones, and it's pushing designers towards
using GNOME).

>  including the larger user base of GNOME which is
> what (I believe) has driven it to fracture into so many DE's over the
> last 3-4 years. We need to make sure that people who aren't working
> for Red Hat have a say. Make sure that people who aren't being paid to
> work on free software have a voice. Sure, those of us who are not
> currently paid can speak up on mailing lists, but we're (mostly)
> roundly ignored. This is what has driven the community apart. This is
> the problem.

That's because GNOME is a meritocracy. You don't get to steer GNOME's
development simply by saying something on IRC or a mailing-list. You
need to actually do.

And there are plenty of community members and non-Red Hat employees that
actually do, a lot of them working on both core desktop infrastructure
and some of our new applications.