Candidacy, late.

[Miguel de Icaza <miguel ximian com>]

Hello everyone,

    I apologize for the late email, and I realize that I might not be
elegible for the board since I did not meet the deadline.  

Miguel

    I would like to run for the Gnome Foundation Board of Directors.
I submit my application for the consideration of the elections
committee and the Foundations' membership:

Name:                   Miguel de Icaza
E-Mail:                 miguel ximian com
Corporate Affiliation:  Novell, Inc.

* Summary of my application for 

        Have been an active contributor to the free software movement
        since 1992.

        I am one of the founders of Ximian, one of the GNOME
        companies, where we employ around 40 GNOME hackers that
        develop free software. 

        Have been actively involved for the past two years in the
        development of Mono and the Gtk bindings for C# to simplify
        the development of applications for Gnome, as well as enabling
        developers from Windows to migrate to free systems more
        easily.

        I would like to continue serving on the Board of the GNOME
        Foundation to promote the development, deployment and
        expansion of the project to suit the needs of Unix users
        today.

* My involvement with GNOME and Free Software

        I started the GNOME project in 1997, you can read a detailed
        account of the story of the project from my perspective in
        this web page:

        http://primates.helixcode.com/~miguel/gnome-history.html

        This history is now outdated.

        I have worked in many areas in GNOME: from the foundation
        libraries, to the applications to the early consistency work,
        to the early documentation infrastructure.  I am one of the
        main contributors to the gnome-libs, the bonobo component
        architecture, and the Gnumeric spreadsheet;  And I have
        contributed code in pretty much every one of the core modules
        that make up GNOME. 
        
        When the project was started I did it all on my spare time,
        two years ago me and Nat (another GNOME hacker) started a
        company that would build services around the GNOME platform
        and would improve the GNOME platform.

        I am glad to report that Ximian has succeeded in making
        GNOME easier to install and more wildely available than it was
        before.

        Currently I serve on the board of directors of the Free
        Software Foundation.

        Before being involved with GNOME, I was a contributor to GNU
        and the Linux kernel.

* Mono

        Although I am not active in the day to day development of
        GNOME software per se, I have been working with a small team
        at Ximian and various external contributors on an
        implementation of a C# compiler, a runtime, and a set of
        class libraries including the bindings to Gtk and Gnome
        (called Gtk#).  This project is called Mono.

        Mono is enabling developers to write desktop applications
        faster and leverage the existing GNOME platform as well as
        bringing a new set of development tools to our community.

        Mono not only takes advantage of the Gnome platform, but I see
        it as a mechanism for lowering the barrier of adoption of
        free software for solving vertical markets problems.  We hope
        to win the enterprise markets, and use that to spearhead the
        consumer market in the longer term. 

* My work as a mediator

        A lot of my time has gone into negotiating various interests
        between the various contributors and people who have raised
        issues regarding GNOME, or that are interested in developing
        applications with GNOME.

        I was the first one to suggest Qt to GPL their library back in
        1997 as a solution for their business and the KDE libraries.

        I was among the first ones (or the first one?) to suggest
        Netscape to dual license Mozilla, and spent countless hours
        writing mail to various people to get Mozilla dual licensed
        under the NPL/GPL over time.

        I have spent a lot of time talking to lawyers for various
        companies to get them to license their software under sensible
        terms and hopefully under the LGPL/GPL (OpenOffice being one
        of them). 

        I have tried to find a common ground for contributors that
        have expressed their interested in donating code to GNOME and
        keep their copyrights to allow them to make a profit out of
        their work using dual licensing (libart and xpdf). 

        Together with Nat Friedman, we made the call for the creation
        of the Steering Committe for driving the direction of GNOME
        2.0

        Together with Bart and John, pushed for the creation of the
        GNOME Foundation that will provide a ground for GNOME to
        administer its resources, and a good ground for companies to
        approach the free software movement and contribute to GNOME
        and GNOME related techologies.

* Promotion of GNOME and Free Software.

        Since the early days of the project I have spent a lot of my
        time promoting GNOME in both conferences and magazines.  I
        have delivered about seventy (90) conferences and talks on
        GNOME, GNOME technologies and GNOME related topics.

        I have written a variety of articles on GNOME and its
        foundation for different magazines and reports.

        I have got hardware for GNOME developers when they were in
        need of it; I have negotiated conferences to pay for people to
        attend their conferences; I have tried to get resources and
        sometimes jobs to GNOME hackers that needed them.  I have paid
        out of my own pocket for hardware and travel expenses for
        hackers. 

        I raised most of the funds that were used to bring people to
        the GUADEC conference in Paris.   I was involved in helping
        organize the thirs GUADEC conference in Sevilla, and I
        marginally helped Nat with his Gnome Boston Summit this year. 

        I have tried to get various representatives in various
        countries to adopt free software technologies.  This past year
        in particular has been a very busy year: educating government
        officials in various countries as well as users in communities
        which have historically being segregated from the more
        cohesive North American/European free software communities. 

        In particular I did a Gnome 2.x promotional tour in South
        America, you can read my online report (and witness that I am
        a better at generating C/C# output than HTML) here:

                http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/sur.html

        Pretty much every one of my talks stresses out the importance
        of free software.

* My role in the foundation

        Have a representative role of the GNOME foundation to other
        organizations to work together with them.  Arranging to work
        together towards implementing standards, components, and
        trying to assemble in-house GNOME teams at software and
        hardware companies. 

        Being a GNOME old timer and one of its founder, I still am
        very passionate about the project as I was when we first
        started.  When we started we were hoping to have a quick
        victory over the proprietary desktop, but it has been more
        difficult than expected, the work must continue. 

        The GNOME project has scaled very well, and many teams have
        been created to handle the various tasks of managing the
        project, so my day-to-day help is not as useful in the
        particular teams, but I want to see GNOME succeed. 

        I would continue to do various things to push GNOME forward
        and to make it the standard user environment for free systems
        and for Unix systems. 

        I would continue to try to find the best fit for the various
        interests of the GNOME contributors, both the individual
        hackers which are the core and the spirit of GNOME, and the
        contributions made by companies. 

        Getting and helping organizations, governments and companies
        to adopt GNOME and free software.

        Help in the process of establishing good partnerships and
        alliances with companies to improve GNOME, and help them
        to become free software companies in the long term.

        To promote the creation of GNOME training and teaching tracks
        at the various conferences.

        And all in all, to continue doing the same work I have been
        doing for free software and GNOME in the future, with the
        backup of the Foundation.



-- 
Miguel de Icaza <miguel ximian com>