On Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 2:53 PM, Vincent Untz
Hi,
I read the platforms of all candidates, and I have a few questions :-) I'd appreciate if you could take some time to answer them; it'll help me vote in an informed way.
1) You described various issues you'd like to get fixed and goals you want to achieve. Will you still work on (or help with) those tasks if you're not on the board, or do you think you really need to be on the board for some of those tasks?
I will work on them, even if I am not on the board. But I may not be able to spend much time contigously, in case I am not elected.
2) How much time per week can you secure (approximately) for the board? (I know it will be 0% of your time for some weeks, and much more for some other weeks; I'm interested in the average)
To be honest, I have not done an estimate of it. But all my evenings are open mainly for openSUSE work. So I should be able to spend *atleast 7 hours* atleast per week on an average (not counting dayjob) for openSUSE's Board activities, for the foreseeable future.
3) Did you attend IRC board meetings already?
I have not attended all the board meetings in the past mostly due to different timezones. However, I try to keep irc logged in and read the logs. I have attended some meetings but not actively driven a lot of issues and just participated. However, I have attended the project meetings regularly and participated in discussions of some activities as well (like creation of youtube channel for openSUSE, 11.3 release marketing planning etc.)
4) It's interesting that I see nearly no note about budget/money in platforms. When (not if ;-)) we'll have the Foundation, the board will have to work on a budget. So a few questions about this...
4a) Have you experience with creating/dealing with a budget? 4b) Where will we find money for the Foundation? 4c) What should we use the money for?
I don't have much idea/experience about handling money in a project administrative scale. But I intend to learn it on the job with the help of people who are more experienced in this regard. I try to bring in different set of skills to the board, in return.
5) I do think it'd be useful to have some board-related meeting at FOSDEM. That should help the newly-elected board members to know faster what's happening, and how things work. Will you come to FOSDEM? (I know some people, and that's most probably true for the non-European, will likely not be able to attend; that's not an issue)
FOSDEM is in the first week of February. Board results will be announced by the last week of January. So, that does not give me much time to get my VISA approved by the European union. If I am elected and VISA is also ready, I can attend this. (VISA processing cannot begin without corporate backup for business visas from India. So anticipatory-visa-fetch is not an option)
7) Do you care more about Free Software or Open Source? Just to be clear: there's no wrong answer. But it helps understand why you contribute to projects like openSUSE.
As a developer, I feel putting your source out in the open, is the right way to develop good software. Only if your source code is open, your code will mature and your coding skills will improve. I have learnt more from my pet projects in open-source than my day job (proprietary projects). I care about Freedom of software. Not just from the users perspective but from the developer's perspective also. I believe things like copyright reassignment take away some kind of freedom from the developer and I try to evangelize for freedom whenever I could. But I don't confuse supporting software freedom, with, *blindly supporting FSF*. For instance, I won't advocate for calling our OS as a GNU/Linux distro, or participating in hate-campaigns against Microsoft. It may be a bitter truth, but most users don't care about giving up a little bit of freedom because they are mostly focussed on Getting Things Done. We couldn't move people to give up symbian phones in favor of openmoko by talking about freedom, however, once Android came in, it made symbian almost non-existent. People (most of them) buy their phone to make calls, not to study how it works. Personally, I love GMail and use it even if I lose some kind of freedom by using it. Giving up a little bit of user freedom is fine for most of the people in the world. It may not work well for revolutionaries such as Julian Assange, but majority of our users use our distro, not to change the world, but to just live their lives. So for me, *open-source is vital, developer freedom is vital, user freedom is important* and any restrictions to user freedom should not be coming as surprises and should be pre-known [to the user]. World will be dull without flickr, youtube, wordpress (it aint fully free imho), skype and twitter. Mr. Stallman may be happy with sending an email to retrieve a webpage and not use a browser, but it is an extremity which I won't recommend for a common home user. The primary reason why I contribute to openSUSE is neither for open-source evangelism nor for software freedom, but because of *People*. It is based on a selfish need but without evil motives ;-) openSUSE participation gives me a lot of new perspectives by working with people of different cultures. It helps to talk to people in irc whom I consider as inspirations. Due to this cross culture interactions, my opinions on a lot of things such as religion, women rights, vegetarianism, management styles, music etc. have changed in a lot of ways from what it was 5 years ago, when I had seen just one culture. Participating in openSUSE is like taking a virtual world trip for me. Also, it has helped me improve technically also tremendously. Sorry for the long answer to this question, but it's a sensitive question and I wanted to make my points clear. (while we are at it please read Linus' post on this: http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/11/black-and-white.html )
Sankar: some of your long-term tasks are partly technical (make openSUSE an attractive development platform, make the distro accessibility-friendly). How do you think the board can help with that?
Making attractive to developers: One thing that we could do for it is to make people use our OBS (via open-id) from sites like github and get binaries for their projects. Even though this could be achieved by any openSUSE member, I believe having to communicate with third parties via a formal board representation will gain more representation. Yes, some of the goals are technical but I believe setting them as project goals (a11y, usability etc.) via board, will help in increasing the focus on these items by the subteams.
I wish you all the best for the election :-)
Thanks :-) -- Sankar P http://psankar.blogspot.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org