On Friday 02 Dec 2011 01:31:01 Sankar P wrote:
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 ?
I think that the openSUSE board at the time of the establishment of the foundation will function as a 'bootstrap board' for the foundation until an election is held. The timing of this depends on the legal form of the board. I see our current non-board officials as taking on specific roles within the foundation, for example the Election Committee. Other non-board roles within the foundation will arise over time depending on the workload of the foundation board, for example a community omsbudsman to help resolve conflicts. I think it's too early to consider nominating myself for any specific role in the foundation 'bootstrap board'. I like to think that the board members should be generalists able to help with any issue, except where the legal form of the foundation demands an individual to occupy a role, eg Treasurer.
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 ?
Drawing on my experiences in KDE eV, and assuming a similar structure, I hope that foundation finances should be open to the membership, externally audited annually and should be summarized in a quarterly published report. I do not expect that we will need private budgets.
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 ?
I think it's going too far to bundle some proprietary cloud storage with the default openSUSE distribution. I'm fine if one of our downstreams wants to do this.
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 already do this with the distribution development. I'm not sure it's one of our core competencies to do this for end users.
We can charge users a small fee and promise to not spy/sell their data.
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 ?
Perhaps in return for making openSUSE a freely downloadable install in XBox Live Arcade! No, seriously, search engines are a funnel which people pour their personal data down for the proprietor to sell, and I don't think it's up to us to push our users' data to one for a few bucks. I'd prefer it if our browsers made this explicit the first time the user did a toolbar search and allowed a choice. Although I've grown past the 'Microsoft is teh evil' stage, and lived through the fallout of the Novell-Microsoft deal, you have to consider the implications of your choices.
5) vim or emacs ? (Just trolling here. You can avoid. You'll get +10 points if you answer both)
originally memacs on Amiga, then emacs 19 or so on Linux, then vim for the last few years, because I have a very big .vimrc. Will -- Will Stephenson, openSUSE Team SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Jeff Hawn, Jennifer Guild, Felix Imendörffer, HRB 21284 (AG Nürnberg) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org