Hi Gerfried, On Tue, 2010-11-02 at 07:42 +0100, Gerfried Fuchs wrote:
From what I can tell, Vincent is his own for a start, if any. :)
That is probably correct - at the end of the day his master plan is to turn us all into french folk, he just chooses to use GNOME & free software as his tools to do so :-)
Had a little conversation with Rhonda after he published it, from his point of view he has right. So look after planet.ubuntu.com u can find there vuntz ;)
I don't understand. How does he have the right to say Vuntz represents Ubuntu? He's one of our folks.
I clearified it in my blog entry where I also posted it to: <http://rhonda.deb.at/blog/debian/report-opensuse.html>
I think basically what has happened here is a bit of misunderstanding and I'm sure no malice is meant.
Right. I was involved in Ubuntu a while ago (2004-2006, I'd say, before I chose to focus on GNOME), and I'm still an Ubuntu member. I'm following what's happening there, because I have friends in the Ubuntu world and because it's important for upstream GNOME.
That being said, I'm much more a GNOME/openSUSE person than a Ubuntu/GNOME one (I'm using openSUSE, and I contributed much more to openSUSE than to Ubuntu). I guess it's safe to say that I don't represent Ubuntu in any way anymore, and I certainly wasn't at the openSUSE conference with a Ubuntu hat :-)
If it would make you lot feel better, I will send the same clearification to the mailinglist, too. Actually it seems that Vincent was there with as much Ubuntu hat as myself, or rather, me possibly more than him because I actually also have upload rights to Ubuntu.
Still, frankly spoken, I am a fair bit astonished about the claiming that a person belongs to someone, especially exclusively, especially in the free software community. Yes, I should have done more research about Vincent, and I appoligize for not having done that, but the impression with Vincent's blog on Planet Ubuntu did lead to that, especially since planet ubuntu is explictly meant for ubuntu related stuff, like can be read in the Guidelines: <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PlanetUbuntu>
I don't think the intention was to claim Vincent as OURS, he is more upstream GNOME than openSUSE - he uses us as his tool to do his upstream work. I think the concern was created as there is so much talk of Ubuntu's divergence from upstream after the Untiy announcement, and many people are aware of Vincent's affiliation with openSUSE and also his employer being Novell. I'm not saying Ubuntu are or are not diverging, purely the fact that there is talk in the community about it. Vincent does indeed contribute to all distros that use GNOME, purely by the nature of his upstream position. As for distro involvement he is mostly involved in openSUSE. Simple.
If people absolutely want to give me a Ubuntu hat, then I should be considered as a GNOME/openSUSE/Ubuntu person. And we could maybe add some freedesktop.org stuff in there to be complete ;-)
Right. I haven't claimed you to be exclusive, especially since I even stated Ubuntu/GNOME, and such exclusive thinking is in my personal opinion not really helping the overall though of "Collaboration across Borders". Actually the sort of responses somehow makes me think that collaboration might not really be appreciated, but then, this might also be a as skewed view as which I left with my report from the conference.
Open source is very much a non-monogamous affair, so it is perfectly normal for someone to be involved in more than one project and also have those projects be competitors to one another.
cc'ing Gerfried so he knows about this.
Thank you very much to give me the chance to explain how it came to this.
Many thanks for firstly attending the conference, it was a pleasure to have you there. Also thank you for responding to Ubuntu's request to attend. At the very least one good thing that I have noticed is that Ubuntu and Debian are starting to work together and talking more. The derivatives list is a very good thing and long may it continue. I hope you don't feel that we at openSUSE are being somewhat childish about this. It is not our intention - honest. Many thanks for attending, and thank you for listening to us :-) Regards, Andy -- Andrew Wafaa IRC: FunkyPenguin GPG: 0x3A36312F openSUSE: Get It, Discover It, Create It at http://www.opensuse.org