On Fri, 2011-12-02 at 01:31 +0530, Sankar P wrote:
Hi board candidates,
All the very best to everyone competing in the board election. Personally, this election has a lot of candidates who are too close to me. Aloha Sankar,
Thanks for taking the time to ask the questions.
I have a few very simple questions for the candidates. Please answer them with a soft-limit of 750 characters, per answer. Thanks.
0) Board and Foundation: Will board members be controlling the foundation too ? What roles do you see board members performing in the foundation ? will there be dedicated personnel [from/outside] the board for specific roles in the foundation ? I know that these have been asked in the foundation-list earlier but I am interested in knowing what your idea on this. Will you be interested in nominating yourself for any specific position, say Treasurer, Lawyer, Firefighter ?
My current opinion is that once the Foundation is up and running, the Board will effectively transfer to the Foundation. I've not been privy to all the discussions about the board, and as such my view may change once I have all the facts to hand. I see the Foundation as continuing the Board's mandate but also potentially gaining a larger remit. I would personally discourage any non openSUSE members being brought in to sit on the Foundation in an active role unless they had a specific area of expertise (e.g. financial/legal) that couldn't be filled otherwise, but I would not be against having an "outsider" on the Foundation in an advisory role.
1) Financial Transparency: Assuming that the foundation will be setup soon, what aspects do you think that the financial processes of the foundation should have ? What level of openness do you propose ? Should everything be in black and white or there can be costs which are not shared public ? How often should a reporting be made in terms of the financial status ? Should we follow some other open source projects here ? Say GNOME/KDE ?
I would strive to have as open a ledger as possible, publishing it at regular intervals (quarterly/bi-annual/annual). As for processes, I'm not entirely sure what you mean; a lot of the process will be governed by whatever country the Foundation is setup in, please feel free to elaborate on what you mean.
2) Software Freedom in the era of cloud: Earlier people were locked into proprietary data formats (like doc, ppt) (before OOXML) but now people voluntarily lock their data (mails, photos) into cloud storage. Some feel paranoid about this. Some feel that this fear is much similar to the fear that people had when Banks were introduced to store people's money. Do you think that it is okay to trade a little freedom for a little free online storage, for some home users at least ?
That's a fairly personal question ;-) I don't see anything abhorently wrong, but it all depends on what the freedoms sacrificed are. I for instance try and avoid using US based cloud services for anything overtly personal, thanks to the Patriot Act, but that is just my personal preference. Don't get me wrong, I use a whole heap of Google's services, I also use Dropbox and other US based cloud services because they just work and are at an acceptable price point. If I pay nothing, I have to accept the limitations imposed by this level of convenience. I do also however host my own cloud services for my personal use - ownCloud, e-mail, blog etc.
3) openSUSE Hosted Solutions: Do you think openSUSE should enter into hosting things and providing online services for users (like ubuntuone, gmail, dropbox etc.) ? We can charge users a small fee and promise to not spy/sell their data.
To be honest, I have thought at times in the past that we should have some hosted services, but as time has passed I realised it would be better if we partnered with someone who does this as a core business. We need to focus as a project and having all these extras takes focus away from what we are doing, which is making a kick arse great distribution and other open tools (yes, good old OBS etc).
4) Hypothetical Scenario: If Microsoft offers us a few thousand dollars as part of Bing marketing for making Bing the default search engine and homepage on openSUSE, will you accept it ? If no, Why not ?
This would depend on the actual amount offered. If it was $5,000 per annum, I don't think that would be worth it. Also I would also strongly against changing our homepage even if they offered us $20,000. I would need to see what the financial outgoings are to be able to make a decent guess on what amount would be financially viable. I would also make sure that the community was involved in the decision, and explain our reasoning for wishing to partner with them. At the end of the day, Microsoft is a much better OSS company now than many existing companies in the field.
5) vim or emacs ? (Just trolling here. You can avoid. You'll get +10 points if you answer both)
Vim all the way for me! Mainly due to the fact that it is what I was introduced to when I started out, and have never really used Emacs. At the end of the day, it's horses for courses. If it works for you then great, stick with it - don't fix it if it isn't broken.
Listmates, Please avoid arguing over any of the responses. These are just personal opinions and we should respect all of them. We can disagree with them when they are proposed as a board item. Now it is just a campaign response.
Thanks a lot and All the best :-)
Thank you for taking the time to engage with us, and I hope that I can serve you well on the next Board.
-- Sankar P http://psankar.blogspot.com
Regards, Andy -- Andrew Wafaa IRC: FunkyPenguin GPG: 0x3A36312F -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org