Hi Michael,
First my bias - I believe this is the wrong decision. Nevertheless - were I convinced that in fact it was made by a reasonably open and transparent process - I would be able to accept it in good conscience - in the spirit of tolerance and community; all democrats get to swallow bitter fruit sometimes :-) Well said.
On Thu, 2009-08-20 at 15:56 +0200, Michael Loeffler wrote:
After consideration of the project discussion I discussed the feature request further with the openSUSE Board and other leaders within the openSUSE project and came to the decision
This is most interesting. When you say you "discussed the feature request" with the openSUSE Board - what was their considered recommendation ? Frankly, the openSUSE Board was just a mirror of the community. So again a
Moin, On Tuesday 25 August 2009 13:07:50 Michael Meeks wrote: pretty heated discussion. No clear recommendation.
It is one thing that the board discusses the issue, and comes to a compromise. It is another thing to (somehow) -trust- that, inside the head of one person - who happens to be a KDE user, based in a KDE hotspot ;-) -
a balanced decision is made, taking into account both the volume and quality of evidence on both sides. It is not really a process open to scrutiny - short of some MRI scanning machine ;-) Worse - it seems to me that an equally reasonable, but different person may well have made a different decision. If you take into account the surveys, openSUSE's history, the feedback and votes for the feature I think I made a pretty democratic decision. Just to notice I'm now the Product Manager for the distribution for 3-4 years and no one complained yet about decisions. By the way, almost all decisions are done by maintainers, interested groups on mls or so and just the ones the community can't come to a decision gets on my table and I have the pleasure to decide.
In summary, it is somewhat surprising, amid all the talk of the critical importance of "doing what the community wants" for a decision of this importance and scope, to be made by a single, appointed, Novell employee, in a permanent, irremovable maintainership role. The advantage of elected representatives is that as/if/when they make silly decisions, there is at least a hope of replacing them. I think we can be sure that this person is removable if doing the wrong
huh - so, I'm working at the wrong place to make an objective decision. Sounds weird to me. things.
I would ask that at the openSUSE conference we can come to an understanding of a rather more useful role for the openSUSE board for this kind of decision. Is it planned to have a discussion on this narrow topic of transparency; indeed the whole issue of openSUSE governance seems like it could do with re-visiting [ clearly with no reference to this current hot topic ].
Yes, the governance topic will be covered during the conference.
We want to make clear that both desktops are considered equal citizens within the openSUSE Project
How about actually sketching out what this really means, if indeed it means anything at all, to re-assure the GNOME guys that this is not the very unsubtle end of a big wedge to squeeze them out, and make their (already un-necessarily unpleasant) experience of openSUSE advocacy worse.
Please don't read things into a radio button which aren't there. Best M
As an example, can you give any assurances around my concerns about conferences - presenting both desktops equally eg. ? providing live-CD media instead of DVDs - so GNOME advocates don't have to hand out default-KDE-installs left and right ? other trivial examples might be boxed set screenshots (if the boxed set rides again), printed marketing materials etc. We have one prominent area where they are not treated equally - I assume the plan is to spread that aggressively to other areas - can you reassure ?
Thanks,
Michael.
-- Michael Löffler, Product Management SUSE LINUX Products GmbH - Nürnberg - AG Nürnberg - HRB 16746 - GF: Markus Rex -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org