Gnome Preliminary Election Results In

makapuf writes "First results of Gnome Board elections have been issued. They include some well known gnome hackers, Miguel & others, along with Tesla Gwyne, but RMS has not been elected. Remember this is only temporary and see the results on Gnotices. You can see RMS' responses of the application form."

Comments

Urgh

[Anonymous DWord]

It's actually Telsa Gwynne. Close though. :)

Domination by a few companies

[amorsen]

In retrospect the protection against company dominations could have been stronger. Of those elected:

4 are employed by Ximian
3 are employed by RedHat
3 are without affiliation
1 is employed by Compaq

As it is, Ximian and RedHat together have almost 2/3 of the seats. Both are respectable and honourable companies and I am sure that they will try to keep the viewpoints of the whole GNOME community in mind when they decide issues, but it is hard for them to represent important GNOME backers such as Sun Microsystems.

One can hope that the GNOME Board will consult with the greater community when they are facing important issues. They could invite people with different affiliations as non-voting guests for select meetings, perhaps.

Re:FUCK RMS

[Anonymous DWord]

Here's his application, just in case you're curious: http://nm.debian.org/nmstatus.php?email=rms%40gnu. org

Application Manager Assigned: jordi assigned on 2001-11-25

The following things need to happen still:

• ID to be checked by AM
• Philosophy and Procedures to be checked by AM.
• Tasks and Skills to be checked by AM.
• Your Application Manager will put their approval to the DAM.
• DAM to approve application
• DAM creates new account

Re:Board dominated by Ximian and Red Hat

[JamesHenstridge]

First of all, members of the foundation board are not representatives of their respective companies -- there is a separate Advisory Board comprising representatives of companies on the foundation. Decisions are made by the Foundation Board though.

Well, last year, the majority of the board was split over Red Hat, Ximian and Eazel. As Eazel went out of business, they aren't listed as the affiliation of any board member now.

There are other companies that have been working on GNOME, such as Sun and CodeFactory, but their work on GNOME (or the company itself) doesn't seem to have as high a profile. The Sun hackers have been doing a lot of great work on accessibility and GNOME 2.0. CodeFactory hackers maintain a number of core libraries in the GNOME 2.0 platform (Anders maintains libgnome and libgnomeui), and work on various other libraries/applications such as gtkhtml2 and Mr Project.

If you want to see more diversity in affiliation, try and convince more companies to pay for hackers to work on GNOME (the company doesn't need to join the Advisory Board though).

Re:What I found vaguely interesting

[Russ Nelson]

The FSF has given out gnu.org mailing addresses like pretty girls at parades give out candy. I've got one, if I chose to use it. nelson with the domain of gnu.org gets to me.
-russ

Re:Graphical network object model environment.

[sydb]

Gnome advocates will tell you of the plight of the pore shareware author who must develop his nifty new application for Gnome as the competing desktop is built on a GPLed library.

Which Gnome advocates? I'm a Gnome advocate (Use Gnome!), but I would never say "Because it's great for shareware authors!", even though it in fact is.

Have a look at the Gnome web site.

Tell you what, I'll save you a mouse click. Some quotes:

GNOME is part of the GNU project, and is free software

The GNOME project was born as an effort to create an entirely free desktop environment for free systems.

The GNOME project was the first to provide a fully free desktop environment for Unix-like systems. Free Software is about empowering users, and about granting them rights over the software they use. With Free Software, the user gets a number of rights:

• The right to use the software.
  
  
• The right to redistribute the software: if you have a piece of free software, you can share this software with other people (no license fees are required).
  
  
• The right to learn from the software.
  
  
• The right to alter the software (all source code, data files, images are included). For example, users can improve it, extend it, trim it down, fix problems, learn or experiment.
  
  
• The right to redistribute your modified versions of the software. This means that once you have made changes to the software, you can distribute these changes to your friends, customers or anyone else.
  

These rights and freedoms are at the core of the GNOME project. The side effects of Free Software are that the software tends to be of very high quality, it evolves very rapidly, problems are fixed quickly, and in general the system is better both for the user and the developer.

Now stop trolling, understand what you are talking about before you open your underinformed cakehole.