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Ask questions to the candidates running for the GNOME Foundation elections

Submitted by baris on Sat, 2005-11-19 09:01. Gnome Foundation
Gnome Foundation

Membership Committee will announce 2005 Fall election candidates today or tomorrow. Before the voting starts, a debate will happen. We usually send questions to the candidates to launch the debate. If you want to see some discussion about what is important to you, here's your chance to make it happen! Of course, you'll still be able to directly ask questions to the candidates by posting them on foundation-list.

Please ask one question per post (and no more). The 10 best questions will be selected from this blog and previous years questions and sent to the candidates. So you may want to look at the questions from previous elections, at GnomeDesktop.org. As with the recent referandum over board size there will be 7 people on board. Since this will make it harder to choose from all hard working candidates, it's better to get their ideas over different subjects to make foundation members' decision easier.

Note that being on the board of the GNOME Foundation is not a technical job, so please try to avoid posting questions about software development.

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Dear candidate: Will you be by Scarlet

People

Submitted by hauberg on Tue, 2005-11-22 08:18.

Do you as a candidate know why people don't understand

Note that being on the board of the GNOME Foundation is not a technical job, so please try to avoid posting questions about software development.

and only ask technical questions?

:-)

Submitted by hauberg on Tue, 2005-11-22 10:16.

First of all, your style of writing seems very angry. If indeed you are angry, please calm down.

Now, I wrote the above to say the board doesn't (as I see it) make decisions like if we should go with mono or java. They make decisions like, how do we let the world know that gnome is amazing. I was trying to say this in a funny way, but if my sense of humor is poor, I apologize.

So I'm just an old fascion kind of guy, who thinks discussions should be relevant :-)

Optimisation by limewolf
Handy website listng the candidates and "campaign" speeches? by Anonymous George
Paper Trail by Anonymous George

Fund Source

Submitted by olafura on Sat, 2005-11-19 16:59.

What sources of funds do you as a candiate try do astablish?
And what will you spend it on?
Not counting revenue from the shop and Friends of GNOME.
Think more like the recent move by Mozilla or a subscription based
bounty system.

Growing communty

Submitted by olafura on Sat, 2005-11-19 16:47.

Gnome is mostly a european and US based project, but seems to have
some following in Latin America and India.
How will you as a candidate grow the contribution base, aspecially
in Asia, Africa and South America.

HLL

Submitted by TopDown on Sat, 2005-11-19 11:42.

What is your view on the potentially GNOME-forking Mono/Java issue. Novell is pushing hard for Mono, and they have already made moves towards putting it right at the heart of GNOME. Sun/Red Hat are pushing hard for Java -- despite its manifest brain-damage! Nobody but a few zealots gives a toss about niche stuff like Python, so you can ignore that if you wish.

So... where you stand, and what will you do to ensure that the GNOME project isn't split down the middle (I assuming you *don't* want that, of course. Employees of companies may not have a choice).

I sort of agree.... by Anonymous George

Re: HLL

Submitted by horga_83 on Sat, 2005-11-19 15:27.

Where exactly has Novell made moves to put Mono into the heart of GNOME? I see no evidence of this. Yes there are Mono/Gtk# applications but that has nothing to do with the core of GNOME.

I'd like to second this

Submitted by Anonymous George on Sat, 2005-11-19 13:08.

I'd like to second this question.

This exact question was very pertinent last time the elections rolled around. There was a lot of neutral grumbling and people being careful not to piss off anybody, and then everything kind of died down. Now we're sitting at exactly the same place. Hopefully the upcoming year brings more change and less rumblings of change.

One question by TopDown

(Mis)leading question

Submitted by newren on Sat, 2005-11-19 15:05.

Not only are your questions leading, the implication you are making is just flat wrong.

I'm involved in a number of big "direction" decisions being made and I'm a volunteer. As a volunteer I have become a bugmaster, have heavily influenced the direction of metacity, became a co-maintainer for libwnck, and am a member of the release team (and, in fact, recently became the release team manager though that's a role that I'm actively trying to make not mean much; especially since I'm in the odd situation where everyone else on the team is more qualified to be on it than I am). I'm not the only volunteer like this. Take a look a previous post of Kjartan's (who has been even more influential as a volunteer) saying very similar things. I could point you at several other very influential volunteers as well.

Yes, there are a large number of developers who get paid by various companies to work on Gnome, but that's a reflection of the fact that the community is growing to the point that businesses are interested in it and thus tend to hire many of the individuals in the community (and/or individuals in the community start up a company themselves). But that's no different than how the linux kernel operates. I, for one, believe all the candidates currently running would make very good foundation directors and that those who factor employer-of-individual into their voting decisions are making a mistake; I understand that not everyone feels that way but the situtation is definitely nowhere close to what you imply.