All which use GNOME technologies. Mate is moving to GTK3, so they'll be using all our libraries they'll just do a different design than shell. Cinnamon is not using shell, but they are using GTK+ and other bits. Unity will use GNOME technologies until they finally port to QT.
Sure, it's a management problem, and you're right we weren't equipped to execute it. We've learned and now we're fixing it. Some things are not always discoverable.
The issue is a little more complex than that. But ultimately, we are to blame, yes.
We are starting up a QA team that hopefully will at least check to make sure that extensions work. The other thing is working on some automated integration testing. We have a continuous integration server already, so we are definitely improving quality of testing and releases.
The reason some things are removed is a little complex. Some features are removed because it doesn't fit the product design as it was conceived. Other times it's removed so that it can be re-implemented at a later time in a way that is improved or makes better sense. Other times, it could just be that the mintainer who removed it could have been completely asinine about it. It happens. What makes it hard is that a lot of this happens in a real product, but in a Free Software project, you see all the dirty details and half steps because it is after all being done in the open. So, yeah, a lot of times the desktop looks incomplete.
One good model to follow and that's hard to do, is to keep the old GNOME 2 around until about 5-6 releases of GNOME 3 and then switch over. The reason this is hard is that someone has to maintain the old stuff and around that time a lot of support for GNOME had kind of dried up because we had a lot of companies like Nokia, Sun, and others who had contributed not just money but people as well. When they went away, it was harder to jump. This is the primary problem, because GNOME 2 wasa also incomplete, once it was more or less complete everybody enjoyed the experience.
The board fell behind on bugging folks on payments because the processing took a lot of time and our financial controller was buried in work. As I was saying elsewhere, it's a scaling problem.
>I don't know whether Gnome wins or loses but I do know they are doing the right thing.
Thanks, it's always great to meet fellow travelers who understand where GNOME is coming from. Not everyone even internally agrees with what we are doing.:)
Well sure, they are objecting to a direction they don't like. They also assume because they don't like it nobody does as well.:-) GNOME depends on logind not systemd itself. In fact, we're working fairly hard to make sure that we do everythrough desktop files so that GNOME continues to be viable on FreeBSD. Perhaps you have missed it, but in our last release we released a preview release on FreeBSD?
Yes, but the initial release made a lot of people upset. After that, of course, the first couple of releases aren't going to be great either. It takes time for software to mature.
This is kind of like declaring victory before the war is over.:-) Each forum has their own particular unique things about it. This one tends to be anti-GNOME. Reddit is generally more balanced and you can see a lot of people who speak up and say they like it. It doesn't fare well in overly technical forums, but does alright in the general case.
Thanks for doing the research and trying to understand. You have the right of it. The OPW program expanded dramatically, and so we became a victim of its success. The funds came out of our general funds because collection was inconsistent. GNOME Foundation manages the OPW program. It became 25% of temporary loans because it became very popular.
GNOME is not financing OPW, it costs money to join OPW, and there is an administrative fee involved as well. So to some extent GNOME takes in some money as well. But if OPW sponsors don't pay on time as can happen, it has to come out of the general fund. Does it make sense.
That's a great point. It's true that a lot of them were probably all Unix systems administrators or other technical people. This crowd has a lot that because it feels different from reddit which has a younger crowd, a lot who came in during Ubuntu. You can tell because a number of them expressed surprise that you could paste with the middle click.:-)
Regarding teh FreeBSD - yes, a lot of people here enjoy and thrive on the traditional Unix experience. Large changes to things like the init system is a direct attack on that.
Hardware changes, and thus one has to change with it. If we stuck with the old stuff, there would be nothing relevant for the younger people who grew up on the touch experience. We would be completely out of touch, and we would be in the bargain basement. But for a lot of people here, that's okay with them. Unfortunately, that doesn't help Free Software in the future.
> Careful there, you're as guilty of the quick dismissal of other people as they are of GNOME.
It's just an observation of reading this site for 18 years. There are always exception to the rule. I'm one of them. I'm in the same change hating demographic, but I adapt and change to my computing environment.
I'm not trying to dimiss people "who hate change". But you can see how GNOME discussions have transitioned to Systemd, and there are even hostile overtures about KDE on this topic. People are uncomfortable with where things are going with user space. But ultimately, people are upset because we aren't adhering to status quo. I say this as someone who does this all the time for 3 years. If you've been arguing like this and I'm tlaking about everyone from kernel developer to random people on the internet, you can start seeing the patterns.
Yes, but we are only managing the program. We are not spending money on it. The current situation is actually a borrowing situation because the OPW program was not getting payments consistency. Since GNOME foundation is running the program on behalf of OPW, they were on the hook to making sure the interns get paid. But it's not normal tha GNOME is paying OPW interns unless it is part of the project, which is completely fine. Being part of OPW is just as good as being part of GSOC.
If you focus on the technology, which is ostensibly your goal, anyway, then you are being truly agnostic towards irrelevant traits because you are not using them to select for or against particular contributors. This grants them each an equal opportunity to contribute. In contrast, your OPW program is basically granting privilege to women and relabeling it as a more palatable noun ('outreach'). Feminist organizations do this all the time, and then shame organizations that don't comply.
Yes, but nobody is truly agnostic about anything. We humans don't work that way.:-)
Creating a comfortable environment is fine as long as it remains productive, but when it starts favoring irrelevant political leanings/agendas, and coddles insecurity and histrionic behavior, it's gone too far. If they've managed to divert significant portions of funding towards goals irrelevant to your organization's agenda, it's time to clean house.
The problem is that enough is never enough for these people. You will ALWAYS have an OPW program because yesterday's efforts are just not good enough for today. It will consume as much resource as you let it.
Creating a comfortable environment is really all we want. Outreach programs should always have a sunset clause. It shouldn't go on forever. I completely agree there.
It had nothing to do with Karen honestly. While one could draw some line for when she left and when the crises occured, the truth of hte matter is that we didn't track our finances very well. So, after going through the books we realized that we had a shortfall due to the fact that we did not do collections from the OPW program. See, the OPW program became very popular very quickly, and organizations were not paying on a timely basis. Since interns had to be paid, the funds were coming out of the general funds.
OPW should have their own general fund in which to tkae money out of instead of using GNOME's. That was where the mistake was. So, we're going back and getting the money owed so that we can fix up the general fund for GNOME. We should be back on even footing again by July.
It is one of those things where it sneaks up on you. We pretty much was able to handle it until we had a large number of organizations join and then our processes didn't scale. Plus, how we do our financials is pretty slow, we're using GNUCash and the methodology of looking at our bank account doesn't allow multiple people to look at it. So a single point of failure. So we have a number of issues that caused the problem. So we are working on improving them. Again, this is not some kind of disaster, we just need to finish our collections.
We have had discussions about it. I can't give a complete explanation at the moment as what I tell the public should go through the board so that we are giving a consistent message. When dealing with lots of people asking the same questions it is probably better to update the FAQ. I suggest you subscribe to the URL there so that you can keep up.
That doesn't mean much, we lost a lot of people during GNOME 2 transition from GNOME 1. There will always be an ebb and flow. People distro hop and desktop hop all the time. Some folks just want a desktop that never changes because either they don't change, or their work environment doesn't change or whatever.
Yes there is. Reaching out to women because they're women is discrimination based on sex, which is inherently hypocritical when it's done under the feminist (stated) claim that sex doesn't matter. What you should discriminate on are programming and other relevant skillsets. Since race, sex, and sexual 'lifestyle' are poor indicators for those traits, you shouldn't spend significant sums pursuing people along those attributes. Those percentages are meaningless, arbitrary quotas.
I'm sorry, but we must disagree. GNOME is part of GNU which is in fact a social justice organization. Free Software is about that and is part of our creed. The goal is to bring free software to everyone. It helps when our organization is a reflection of the people we are reaching. We are not an open source project.
These PC people are like viruses in that they require the resources of a host organization in order to propagate their ultimately self-interested message, which makes the host's goals of secondary importance to them, if at all. They invade organizations they see as having power in a particular community and sap resources that could be better spent on relevant goals, with particularly virulent ones killing their hosts off, entirely. I realize you mean well, but this is society-wide problem, and the only way to stop it is to resist their influence at the beginning. You might be threatened with 'discrimination' lawsuits and the like, but as long as the organization's policies are (and have a history of being) truly agnostic towards irrelevant attributes (and not just race, sex, and sexual 'lifestyle'), they're morally sound.
Equal outcome is not a good measure of equal opportunity. So, guidelines that discriminate on relevant attributes and pay no heed to balanced populations along irrelevant attributes are NOT oppressive, no matter what shaming language is hurled your way. If that results in a 50/50 split between the sexes, fine.. If not, that's fine too, because your organization is focused on hiring the best developers, not the best male or the best female developers.
Nobody is looking at a 50/50 split. We want to form a community that attracts everyone. When we go through the exercise we create a great place for everyone to be part of Free Software. When you make a place that's great for many kinds of genders or people you make it a great place for everyone. You're fixated on the technology part without thinking about the people. The only thing I would add is that it should have a sunset clause, no program such as this should go on in perpetuity. That would indeed by harmful. But short term programs have great impact for the long term. The hope is that one day we don't need an OPW program.
Slashdot Mirror
All which use GNOME technologies. Mate is moving to GTK3, so they'll be using all our libraries they'll just do a different design than shell. Cinnamon is not using shell, but they are using GTK+ and other bits. Unity will use GNOME technologies until they finally port to QT.
Heh. Yeah, slashdot has never been a friendly forum for GNOME and likely never will be.
Sure, it's a management problem, and you're right we weren't equipped to execute it. We've learned and now we're fixing it. Some things are not always discoverable. The issue is a little more complex than that. But ultimately, we are to blame, yes.
We are starting up a QA team that hopefully will at least check to make sure that extensions work. The other thing is working on some automated integration testing. We have a continuous integration server already, so we are definitely improving quality of testing and releases.
One good model to follow and that's hard to do, is to keep the old GNOME 2 around until about 5-6 releases of GNOME 3 and then switch over. The reason this is hard is that someone has to maintain the old stuff and around that time a lot of support for GNOME had kind of dried up because we had a lot of companies like Nokia, Sun, and others who had contributed not just money but people as well. When they went away, it was harder to jump. This is the primary problem, because GNOME 2 wasa also incomplete, once it was more or less complete everybody enjoyed the experience.
:-) Some days more than others!
Sure.. what's the point of an engagement team if there is no engagement?
The board fell behind on bugging folks on payments because the processing took a lot of time and our financial controller was buried in work. As I was saying elsewhere, it's a scaling problem.
It is one ofthe drawbacks of extensions. We're working on improving that experience.
>I don't know whether Gnome wins or loses but I do know they are doing the right thing. Thanks, it's always great to meet fellow travelers who understand where GNOME is coming from. Not everyone even internally agrees with what we are doing. :)
Well sure, they are objecting to a direction they don't like. They also assume because they don't like it nobody does as well. :-) GNOME depends on logind not systemd itself. In fact, we're working fairly hard to make sure that we do everythrough desktop files so that GNOME continues to be viable on FreeBSD. Perhaps you have missed it, but in our last release we released a preview release on FreeBSD?
Yes, but the initial release made a lot of people upset. After that, of course, the first couple of releases aren't going to be great either. It takes time for software to mature.
This is kind of like declaring victory before the war is over. :-) Each forum has their own particular unique things about it. This one tends to be anti-GNOME. Reddit is generally more balanced and you can see a lot of people who speak up and say they like it. It doesn't fare well in overly technical forums, but does alright in the general case.
https://mail.gnome.org/archive...
Go to http://extensions.gnome.org/ You can fix your alt-tab there. :)
GNOME is not financing OPW, it costs money to join OPW, and there is an administrative fee involved as well. So to some extent GNOME takes in some money as well. But if OPW sponsors don't pay on time as can happen, it has to come out of the general fund. Does it make sense.
Regarding teh FreeBSD - yes, a lot of people here enjoy and thrive on the traditional Unix experience. Large changes to things like the init system is a direct attack on that.
Hardware changes, and thus one has to change with it. If we stuck with the old stuff, there would be nothing relevant for the younger people who grew up on the touch experience. We would be completely out of touch, and we would be in the bargain basement. But for a lot of people here, that's okay with them. Unfortunately, that doesn't help Free Software in the future.
It's just an observation of reading this site for 18 years. There are always exception to the rule. I'm one of them. I'm in the same change hating demographic, but I adapt and change to my computing environment.
I'm not trying to dimiss people "who hate change". But you can see how GNOME discussions have transitioned to Systemd, and there are even hostile overtures about KDE on this topic. People are uncomfortable with where things are going with user space. But ultimately, people are upset because we aren't adhering to status quo. I say this as someone who does this all the time for 3 years. If you've been arguing like this and I'm tlaking about everyone from kernel developer to random people on the internet, you can start seeing the patterns.
I wish I could mod you up. :)
Yes, but we are only managing the program. We are not spending money on it. The current situation is actually a borrowing situation because the OPW program was not getting payments consistency. Since GNOME foundation is running the program on behalf of OPW, they were on the hook to making sure the interns get paid. But it's not normal tha GNOME is paying OPW interns unless it is part of the project, which is completely fine. Being part of OPW is just as good as being part of GSOC.
If you focus on the technology, which is ostensibly your goal, anyway, then you are being truly agnostic towards irrelevant traits because you are not using them to select for or against particular contributors. This grants them each an equal opportunity to contribute. In contrast, your OPW program is basically granting privilege to women and relabeling it as a more palatable noun ('outreach'). Feminist organizations do this all the time, and then shame organizations that don't comply.
Yes, but nobody is truly agnostic about anything. We humans don't work that way. :-)
Creating a comfortable environment is fine as long as it remains productive, but when it starts favoring irrelevant political leanings/agendas, and coddles insecurity and histrionic behavior, it's gone too far. If they've managed to divert significant portions of funding towards goals irrelevant to your organization's agenda, it's time to clean house.
The problem is that enough is never enough for these people. You will ALWAYS have an OPW program because yesterday's efforts are just not good enough for today. It will consume as much resource as you let it.
Creating a comfortable environment is really all we want. Outreach programs should always have a sunset clause. It shouldn't go on forever. I completely agree there.
OPW should have their own general fund in which to tkae money out of instead of using GNOME's. That was where the mistake was. So, we're going back and getting the money owed so that we can fix up the general fund for GNOME. We should be back on even footing again by July.
We have had discussions about it. I can't give a complete explanation at the moment as what I tell the public should go through the board so that we are giving a consistent message. When dealing with lots of people asking the same questions it is probably better to update the FAQ. I suggest you subscribe to the URL there so that you can keep up.
That doesn't mean much, we lost a lot of people during GNOME 2 transition from GNOME 1. There will always be an ebb and flow. People distro hop and desktop hop all the time. Some folks just want a desktop that never changes because either they don't change, or their work environment doesn't change or whatever.
Yes there is. Reaching out to women because they're women is discrimination based on sex, which is inherently hypocritical when it's done under the feminist (stated) claim that sex doesn't matter. What you should discriminate on are programming and other relevant skillsets. Since race, sex, and sexual 'lifestyle' are poor indicators for those traits, you shouldn't spend significant sums pursuing people along those attributes. Those percentages are meaningless, arbitrary quotas.
I'm sorry, but we must disagree. GNOME is part of GNU which is in fact a social justice organization. Free Software is about that and is part of our creed. The goal is to bring free software to everyone. It helps when our organization is a reflection of the people we are reaching. We are not an open source project.
These PC people are like viruses in that they require the resources of a host organization in order to propagate their ultimately self-interested message, which makes the host's goals of secondary importance to them, if at all. They invade organizations they see as having power in a particular community and sap resources that could be better spent on relevant goals, with particularly virulent ones killing their hosts off, entirely. I realize you mean well, but this is society-wide problem, and the only way to stop it is to resist their influence at the beginning. You might be threatened with 'discrimination' lawsuits and the like, but as long as the organization's policies are (and have a history of being) truly agnostic towards irrelevant attributes (and not just race, sex, and sexual 'lifestyle'), they're morally sound.
Equal outcome is not a good measure of equal opportunity. So, guidelines that discriminate on relevant attributes and pay no heed to balanced populations along irrelevant attributes are NOT oppressive, no matter what shaming language is hurled your way. If that results in a 50/50 split between the sexes, fine.. If not, that's fine too, because your organization is focused on hiring the best developers, not the best male or the best female developers.
Nobody is looking at a 50/50 split. We want to form a community that attracts everyone. When we go through the exercise we create a great place for everyone to be part of Free Software. When you make a place that's great for many kinds of genders or people you make it a great place for everyone. You're fixated on the technology part without thinking about the people. The only thing I would add is that it should have a sunset clause, no program such as this should go on in perpetuity. That would indeed by harmful. But short term programs have great impact for the long term. The hope is that one day we don't need an OPW program.