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GNOME

Friday 13 August 2010

GNOME Policy on Copyright Assignment

I guess a few people remember that Clutter was proposed for inclusion one year ago. Most of the GNOME community loves it, so there was no real question about accepting it. Except that it required copyright assignment, and the release team didn't really know how to handle this. So we contacted the Foundation Board to see what should be done. And the Board did two things: talk to Intel about it, and work on a more general solution.

First, we talked to Intel to understand if the copyright assignment for Clutter was really needed, or if it could be removed in the future. As this is a discussion involving some legal magic, it obviously took some time. But Emmanuele kept pushing this internally to get a resolution, and in June, it was announced that everybody could contribute to Clutter without signing anything :-) Thanks Intel! It's my guess that this happened not just thanks to GNOME, but I don't have any details on that...

Still, we wanted to have some general guidelines to know how to proceed in case this happens again in the future. The Board discussed this topic with the Advisory Board in December, and after the discussion, we felt that Bradley and Michael had a position that reflected best what would be the position of the community. So we asked them to work on the topic. They wrote some blog entries about the topic, and drafted a first document providing a policy for copyright assignments in GNOME. This got discussed again with the Advisory Board, and finetuned. The whole process took quite some time — and Bradley talked about it during a lightning talk at GUADEC.

As a result, we got two documents that were published in July on the wiki, but I actually only really announced them now. You can read the policy and the additional document, but here's the short version for the lazy ones (quoting my mail):

The inclusion of a new module in GNOME that requires copyright assignment has to be explicitly approved on a case-by-case basis by both the Release Team and the GNOME Foundation Board. The decision will be made based on criteria explained in the policy as well as in this additional document.

It was a great experience to work with Bradley and Michael on this, especially as I was doing nothing and they did all the hard work :-) So I'm glad this is finally out, and even though I personally hope we won't have to look at copyright assignments in the future, at least, now, we will know what to do if the original issue occurs again.

[14:48] | [GNOME] | [#550] | [4 comments]

Monday 21 June 2010

Reminder: apply for the GNOME sysadmin job before Tuesday evening!

In case you missed the news, the GNOME Foundation is hiring a system administrator, and this is happening thanks to many individual donors and Canonical, Collabora, Google and Nokia! I covered all this in a previous post already, so go read it if you never heard of that before. But I'm sure you've heard of it ;-)

What's important today, though, is that the deadline to apply for the job is nearing fast! It's June 22nd. Yes, this Tuesday. Had you forgotten about it? I sure had... So make sure your resume is ready and send it to the board before this deadline! Sure, we've already received applications from various candidates and we've started looking at them, but it could well be that you are the one! Not this one (well, if you are, I have several questions for you), just the person who'll help tame the GNOME infrastructure.

And no, it doesn't mean that the current candidates we have are bad; it just means we want to make sure all candidates apply before the deadline :-)

[02:14] | [GNOME] | [#544]

Wednesday 2 June 2010

Hiring a sysadmin for the GNOME infrastructure

Two months ago, the GNOME Foundation started a fundraising campaign to get money to hire a part-time system administrator. Actually, we started this effort much earlier, but we made it much more visible with this campaign. Thanks to all the donors and to Canonical, Collabora, Google and Nokia, we were able to reach our objective. It was actually too fast for me and I wasn't even able to blog about the campaign in time! Once we realized the money was there, we moved on to the next steps — actually, we had those steps ready in the past, so it was mainly a matter of making sure everything was still okay.

We asked around and confirmed three names to form a hiring committee: Bradley Kuhn, Jonathan Blandford and Brad Taylor. With their help, Paul updated the job description that Owen had written some time ago. And after some discussion to define the whole hiring process, Stormy announced the job today. I really love that there have been so many people involved in this, with everyone targeting the same goal.

So if you love GNOME and if system administration has no secret for you, then go read the job description and if you're interested in the job, make sure to send your resume to the board before June 22nd! It's worth mentioning that an important part of the job will be to lead the sysadmin team (which is made of volunteers) and empower the community to make sure our infrastructure gets even more amazing. As you might know, our infrastructure could certainly do with various improvements, and the person we'll hire will make a difference for our project!

On a personal note, this topic has been something that was on my radar for a long time: I looked in my mail archives and found out that I sent a first mail on this topic in September 2007. Yes, that's nearly three years ago! Of course, in the meantime, this idea was put on hold so we could hire Stormy (a very good decision) and until we managed to raise the money for it (launching the fundraising campaign took much more time than originally planned, unfortunately). Phew. And I still can't believe this is finally happening :-)

[01:23] | [GNOME] | [#542]

Thursday 20 May 2010

GNOME Foundation Elections 2010

Next month, the GNOME Foundation membership will vote to elect a new board. It's that time of the year where we think about how the Foundation is doing, where it's going, and who should help run it. Yeah, we all have to plug our brains for a few weeks :-)

I first want to highlight two important points:

as many probably didn't notice, I want to remind everybody that the deadline to announce candidacies is May 23rd. That's next Sunday. You can see the full timeline in the announcement.
the Membership & Elections committee will again do an amazing job organizing the elections. So a big thank to them for their unsung actions!

If you're thinking of running for the elections, then stop thinking: this mere fact is an indicator that you should run. Else, well, think about it now :-) I've written about the job last year and Paul has written about his experience as a new board member. I can only tell you that it's an amazing position to be in if you care about GNOME: it gives you a different perspective on what's going in the project, you get to work with great minds and you can at least slightly influence the project (by working on new initiatives, or deciding how to allocate the money, among other examples). And you do feel rewarded for your work: you can see how it makes a difference.

If, after reading the previous paragraph and the linked posts, you still wonder whether you should submit your candidacy for the elections or not, I invite you to come talk to any past or current board member. And do the same if you have questions or need details about what it involves to be on the board (meeting over phone every two weeks, very active mailing list, action items to complete, etc.). I obviously can't talk for the others (although I strongly suspect they're like me), but I'll make time for you if you contact me about this. It'd be a shame if you don't run because you're in doubt!

As for me, I won't run this year. Although I decided this after the last elections, I actually had to repeat this to myself many times to make sure I really won't run — I have this bad habit of taking this exact decision and then changing my mind at the last minute (usually for a good reason). It's not an easy decision since I care deeply about the Foundation. But it's also because I care that it's the right decision. I've been on the board since January 2006, which is a long time; a long time that makes things feel too much like a daily routine, and that means a break is a good idea. It's also time to leave my seat to some new blood: putting aside the fact that the new board members can easily be pushed to do a lot of work ;-), there's my belief that we should have more different people involved at this level and knowing some of the internals of our community. Good reasons, but difficult decision; it's stupid, but unsubscribing from board-list won't be easy.

I feel the board has been doing a good job over the past few years, which hopefully means I've contributed to that. I could be worried of leaving, but I'm not: there will likely be some continuity thanks to some current board members running, and Stormy is rocking with her job, so the Foundation will most certainly be in good hands. I'll surely miss the constant flow of information (average of 97 mails a week), but on the other hand, it's also an opportunity to try to help the board from the outside, now that I know how things work.

Now, I'm just eager to see who's going to be elected. Aren't you?

[05:17] | [GNOME] | [#540]

Wednesday 5 May 2010

Marketing Hackfest: Day 1

It looks like I'm good at blogging about the first day of a hackfest and then not continuing that, so I'll continue this trend ;-) I just want to state publicly that I have a few GSettings-related posts in mind to write, though: schema, gconf backend, porting your application, etc., so now I'll have to deliver those posts about the results of this amazing GSettings hackfest!. But I am now in Zaragoza, attending the Marketing Hackfest, so let me write a bit about it.

Andreas

Andreas hard at work by Licio Fonseca

Sumana wrote about the first day quite extensively, so I won't repeat here what she wrote: just go read her post! We're working on the plan and roadmap for the 3.0 launch, but we're not just about the high-level ideas: we're working on design and content (of websites, brochures, etc.), so we'll have results to show. And don't hesitate to send us feedback about what you're reading in blogs or on the wiki: you can leave a comment here, send us a mail, join #marketing on IRC — there are many ways to reach us!

It's exciting to see the whole plan and the many ideas, and here a few things I want to highlight (obviously, much more is worth highlighting!):

Marketing Roadmap: having a marketing plan is good and already makes me happy. Turning the plan into a roadmap is just the logical next step to make sure everything gets executed.

GNOME 3.0 Website: there'll be a specific GNOME 3.0 website to introduce this new version of GNOME, and get people excited about this new version. In the long term, the content will be moved to the main website, but we feel a separate website is the best way to build momentum for the 3.0 effort. The target audience is existing GNOME users and there is already a good sitemap. Work is ongoing for the exact content and design, and the hard work will be the creation of videos. If you're interested in helping there, raise your hand :-)

GNOME Ambassadors: we're preparing materials to help everyone talk about GNOME at events, or at a university, inside a company or just to friends. We've always said that anyone can help represent GNOME like this, but it's a hard task if you have to start from scratch. With talking points, slides, a template for new presentations, business cards, a great shirt for ambassadors, we want to lower the barrier here and help all GNOME enthusiasts share their love for the project.

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