Bringing fdo.org to the next level

[Philippe Fremy]

Well, it seems that so far, freedesktop has worked very well in an 
informal way, without formal board and approval process.

The discussion here are usually enough to foster technical discussion 
and reach consensus between desktops when consensus can be reached.

Can you explain what you think the current problems are with the current 
organisation, and what a new organisation would do to resolve those 
problems ? Your proposition sounds a lot like LSB to me and it was clear 
here that this is not the way freedesktop wants to work.

If your proposition relates to the lengthy discussion about d-vfs or 
dconf, my very personal opinion is that you should first start to write 
code, and then show it and discuss it (like Linus said, "show me the 
code!"). Freedesktop was created in the spirit of people writing code 
and discussing together real problems. It has worked in this way so far. 
I consider the two recent discussion a major exception to this and I 
hope that this is not going to become the trend.

Write code, show it and KDE, Gnome, XFCE, mozilla and other people will 
tell you "This is crap, I am never going to use that" or "this is great 
stuff, I'll convert my code to it next week" or "good work but you need 
to add this and this before I look at it again". In my humble opinion, 
there is no point in discussing the topic anymore. It will be quicker to 
rewrite a kconfig for a new configuration backend, than to discuss 
whether this is possible, desirable and what the possible problems could be.

In the free software world, the consensus is reached upon code, not upon 
discussion.

	cheers,

	Philippe








	Philippe


Philip Van Hoof wrote:
> This might create an immense provocation and/or discussions. I sincerely
> hope this will not happen.
> 
> I propose that the freedesktop.org organisation goes one step further in
> how it works.
> 
> My proposal is to create a board:
> 
> 	o. Each important desktop application and desktop environment
> 	   communities can deliver a certain amount of members to this
> 	   board. (which they can choose themselves)
> 
> 	o. The desktop applications and desktop environment communities
> 	   need to understand that the decisions made by this board are
> 	   important to accomplish the concept of a usable free desktop.
> 
> So a lot like how the GNOME foundation chooses it's board members and
> how the board works. With meetings etcetera. I'm sure KDE als has such a
> board and/or meetings and/or organisation (but I'm unaware how KDE works
> so I can't use it as an example -- which doesn't mean that it's an
> unusable example nor does it mean that I'm trying to say how good GNOME
> is because they have a board. This is not what I'm trying to say here).
> 
> 
> So to have such a board rather than an organisation that only wants to
> give certain services (like CVS and mailinglists) to desktop projects
> (not that this isn't needed and not that this activity should stop of
> course).
> 
> And it shouldn't change the fact that everybody can play a role in the
> discussions (the mailinglists). The members of such a board, however,
> could pick the most interesting topics and the most interesting point of
> views and discuss them in meetings. I think that this will be more
> productive.
> 
> Of course it's just a proposal. An opinion. Nothing serious. Please do
> not start fighting my opinion. The most ideal situation would be that
> this proposal will be just a proposal without a flamewar of fight.
> Understand that it's just an idea. I repeat: an opinion. Mine. Not the
> opinion of all people on this list.
> 
> 
>