Sun 21 Jan 2007
Glad to have you aboard. Actually I would have been happy if you had ended up at the FSF or any FOSS company doing legal work. I know I have talked to you and you have said you are not a technical person but as far as importance to GNOME and Free Software I place you as one of the most influential people I personally know. GNOME loses a small piece of itself the less you are able to be involved but I can say meeting you at the New York GNOME Summit and watching you debate with Richard Stallmen made me realize how diverse and wonderful the community really is. Again, glad to have you aboard.
And now a bit of a note at the sniping that has gone on between different distributions. Luis is the type of person who I wish every hacker would emulate in terms of courtesy towards others. He realizes every distro has something to offer the community and the world. He will point out when something runs counter to the communities memes and praise work which adds value to the community. He carefully tries to avoid situations which would cause a conflict of interest and balances his words with facts and well thought out arguments.
As I said in my talk about GNOME and KDE cooperation and competition, our main competitor is Microsoft. If we end up squabbling over each other we ultimately lose. We want competition, but not at the price of our dignity.
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January 21st, 2007 at 6:01 pm
Thanks for the kind words, J5. Ironically, my original draft of that post had a huge section wailing on Mark’s recent FUD
My personal sense is that if there should be inter-group competition in many cases, based on actual facts- for example, Ubuntu did (until recently) support a far larger number of packages that install and run cleanly than Fedora. Pointing that out has helped lead Fedora to re-assess how they handle Core/Extras, which has made all of us better off. Silliness like Mark’s recent discussion of ‘freeness’ is hurtful to everyone.
GNOME/KDE tends to have worse problems in this recard than inter-distro comparisons do, because the participants on average have a pretty lousy idea of what a good desktop is/looks like. So having ‘fact-based’ and not FUD-based discussions of relative merits is hard. Where we can have ‘fact-based’ discussions, or something close to it, we do get some good solutions- witness d-bus (which grew out of legitimate criticisms of gnome’s lack of a technology comparable to dcop), or Nat’s criticisms of the KDE clock options dialog.
You’re also kind to call my argument with Richard a debate