Board of Directors Elections 2015 - Candidacy - Josh Triplett

[Josh Triplett <josh joshtriplett org>]

Name: Josh Triplett
Email: josh joshtriplett org or jtriplett gnome org
Affiliation: Intel, but not speaking for Intel or wearing my Intel hat
             except when explicitly stated as such.

I've been a Free Software developer for 15 years, and a GNOME user since
the early 1.x days, running GNOME with Sawfish and Window Maker.  I've
seen the transition to 2.0, with its massive improvements in usability
and sensible defaults (especially by 2.2 and 2.4 when the zeal towards
change tempered a bit), as well as the crowd of people saying the sky
was falling and that they were switching to another environment.  I've
seen the transition to 3.0, with its massive improvement in usability
and user experience (especially by 3.2 and 3.4 when the zeal towards
change tempered a bit), as well as the crowd of people saying the sky is
falling and that they are switching to another environment.

I run and depend on GNOME 3 every day, and it's one of the few projects
whose release notes I eagerly anticipate to hear about the next dose of
awesome coming my way.

I originally got involved with GNOME development as part of working on
OpenOffice.org; GNOME hosted the cross-distribution "ooo-build"
patchset, which later became go-oo and then LibreOffice.  My first FOSS
contribution was to make OO.o build without the then-proprietary Java.

I'm primarily a plumbing developer; I work on the Linux kernel,
low-level libraries and daemons, and distribution glue.  I'm a prolific
bug reporter for several projects, often with patches; I like working to
get bugs fixed rather than worked around, even when working around them
would be easier or require changes in fewer places.

More recently, I've worked on several policy issues: I worked with
Sriram Ramkrishna and Andrea Veri to help address the Groupon issue, and
I wrote what is now the GNOME Foundation's official policy for depicting
GNOME in film/video.  I enjoy working on policy and enablement issues in
addition to development.  As with my goal of seeing bugs fixed rather
than worked around, I prefer to tackle difficult policy issues head-on
rather than avoiding them.  If elected as a Board member, I plan to take
that as "here's your mop and plunger, get to work".

GNOME has a difficult challenge ahead, carefully balancing the goals of
the GNOME user community, the GNOME developer community, the broader
community of people using and building on GNOME technologies, and the
ultimate goal of building the best possible Free Software desktop
environment.  In the GNOME 3 timeframe especially, GNOME often helps
drive improvements in the full stack, from the kernel on up, and vice
versa.  This makes it possible for GNOME to tackle difficult technical
goals that could not be solved with changes to GNOME alone.  However, it
also requires increased collaboration among plumbing developers, as
those components must serve the needs of many different users and
environments.  In addition, GNOME's own components are increasingly used
in environments other than GNOME, requiring the same improvements to
collaboration.

I look forward to helping GNOME better address this and other
challenges.

- Josh Triplett