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 :-) 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 ? Did they suggest you make this choice ? Or did you just -tell- them what you had already decided - and then discuss that ? indeed - what was the process here ? it appears remarkably opaque. Surely, in this case boot-strapping from the transparent openSUSE election process, and the general mix of the board as representatives of the community would make most sense. 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. 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 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 ].
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. 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.meeks@novell.com <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-project+help@opensuse.org