On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 13:07 +0100, Michael Meeks wrote:
Hi AJ,
On Tue, 2009-08-04 at 14:16 +0200, Andreas Jaeger wrote:
After reading all emails and having many discussions about the default desktop topic, I've wrote up the following draft proposal (at the end of my long email) and propose to enact it.
One of the things that most interests me about this debate is the excessive argumentation and extrapolation from whatever percentage of install-base, to the idea that we should substantially offend our growing Gnome community. Personally, I'm pretty annoyed by claims that openSUSE is, or should be a KDE focused distribution, whatever it's history - that at least is my bias.
Having said that - all this talk of "policy", and logic, reason, marketing and so on suggests to me that this decision is a highly charged, multi-disciplinary, nuanced - and *extremely* non-technical one. In fact, it is hard to discern any technical issue here at all - the code change in question is utterly trivial, even for my basic ycp skills :-)
Indeed, to me this looks like a simple conflict between three opposed view-points[1] "KDE default, no default, and GNOME default" - with apparently no substantial chance of compromise, and seemingly a lack of clarity around who is empowered to make the decision. Indeed - to me, it seems like we have the obvious compromise position selected already.
I believe we voted for a fairly independent board, which would help resolve such conflicts and facilitate the decision making process. I for one, would defer to their view on the matter - and no doubt (like the Lisbon Treaty in Ireland) we will have multiple opportunities to vote on this issue in future, if only as part of the board election process :-)
Have we even asked the board ? if not, why not ? if so, what did they say ? and who should be the ultimate decision maker here ?
Thanks,
Michael.
[1] - it is amusing to see it regularly framed as a choice between only two options: "obedience to (some people's perception of) the democratic will of the majority vs. some unusual disobedience of that". To trot out such a simplified view of democracy and politics is - frankly amazing to me. -- michael.meeks@novell.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot
Hi Michael, To directly answer one of your questions: No, this matter has not been asked directly to the board, nor have we had an opportunity to formulate any opinion on this matter. I actually have been away on an extended road trip and only just in the last few days returned to find what has transpired. It is my understanding that this matter occurred rather rapidly in this current cycle, and yes, as you've said, undoubtedly as in the past, this matter will continue to arise in the future. Because my initial review of statements here on the mailing list and elsewhere, I have held back on making any statements to the matter because it is clearly a highly-charged one and quite emotionally influenced. There is quite a bit of vitriol being posted in multiple places and I have been concerned with adding to it in any way with any statements that I might personally add to this debate. Those who know me, know that I am a GNOME user. It is the DE that I am most comfortable with. I am also proud that I have not emphasized a bias in any Board discussions in the past for GNOME and attempt to be as independent and unbiased as possible. If anyone wishes to know specifically why I choose GNOME as my personal DE, quite simply it is because it is the most accessible DE. To its credit, GNOME and its developers have invested heavily and worked hard to make GNOME accessible to as many people as possible. I have noticed many statements that KDE is a more "modern desktop." This is however a flawed statement because KDE is not in that category as far as I'm concerned. Other proprietary desktops are far more a11y-friendly than our open source Desktops and believe it or not, it does make a difference. More and more government agencies as well as corporations are under legal mandate to ensure their systems are accessible before even considering allowing whatever choice they have into their environment. There are a number of publicly known cases where open source desktops have been rejected specifically because it is not yet accessible. To be honest, I have both KDE and GNOME installed on my desktop. I am VERY curious to use KDE and have used KDE when I first started using Linux some years ago. But as my vision continues to deteriorate, I have been unable to use KDE beyond simple login to the environment. Once I am in, it is completely unusable. What people choose and are comfortable with in their own home is important, but so too is the comfort that businesses and governments have in adopting open source solutions. And if we want to push for open source to spread, especially using openSUSE, then we have to support both Desktop Environments. To its credit, KDE does recognize some of these issues and is working hard to resolve this matter. There is a lot of work going on right now to port GNOME a11y apps to DBUS so that KDE a11y users can begin to use some of the more advanced a11y apps available. It is a beautiful thing to watch KDE and GNOME developers working together to make this happen when I observe the a11y IRC channels. The sad irony here is we're debating favoring KDE over GNOME, but in order to make KDE as accessible as GNOME, KDE will be using GNOME apps. Back to your question about the Board's involvement in this matter. Our role is very limited here. We can review the situation and make recommendations, hopefully under independent and unbiased conclusions, we are not empowered with any level of technical decision making with respect to the distro itself. Our primary purview is the community. That being said, this has become a highly-charged political matter and we will likely need to discuss this in the very near future and hopefully come up with some guidance or recommendations we can forward to decision makers such as AJ, Michl, and Coolo, but at this time, our voice is essentially the same as all of yours, our voice is Community. My personal feeling is, we all need to calm down. Give this rational thought and then make the best recommendation that benefits the Project as a whole. And what benefits us as a whole is that we grow our community which includes GNOME and KDE users and in which both segments have seen growth. -- Bryen Yunashko openSUSE Board Member GNOME-A11y Team Member www.bryen.com (Personal Blog) www.planet-a11y.net (Feed aggregator of the Accessibility Community) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org