Voting rights - the GNOME way

[Harri Porten]

On Fri, 22 Nov 2002, Vadim Plessky wrote:

> In fact, I was thinking wether I need something like @kde.org address or not.
> And, from my point of view, it's more important to *contribute* to some 
> project than to speak about it, get nice business cards, etc.
> (i have enough bullshit like "business cards", "corporate meetings", etc. in 
> daily/business time)
> 

> | Settling such issues might require a formalized decision
> |  making process. As little formal as possible, of course.
> 
> Would be nice to hear your proposal on such process.

I don't have a big master proposal waiting (and wouldn't bring it up now
anyway as I'll be on vacation next week;). I'm actually mostly happy with
the way KDE works. But with the continuous growth in size and importance
we'll have to tackle issues like trademark violations etc. They have to be
dealt with and doing so requires quite some formalities unfortunately.

If you ask about my vision: While I don't wish to have that many rules and
titles as the Debian project I very much sympathize with their democratic
self-government and the SPI/Debian split (here KDE e.V/KDE).

> Let's suppose, for example, that both you and me have voting rights (about KDE 
> future/policy, etc.), and we voted *for* decision "KDE should support CSS3".
> And than Dirk Mueller comes and says: "guys! you want CSS3?  Code it on your 
> own. I don't want to spend my time on that crap"

Nobody with a sane mind would like to work like this (rather shows how
easy statements like mine can be misunderstood). Most of us work on
KDE for fun and in their spare time. Even the Debian people which have a
rather strict self-organization state as their constituion's first rule at
http://www.debian.org/devel/constitution:

"Nothing in this constitution imposes an obligation on anyone to do work
for the Project. A person who does not want to do a task which has been
delegated or assigned to them does not need to do it. However, they must
not actively work against these rules and decisions properly made under
them."

> I can tell you the truth:  I haven't seen *any* KDE statement for the last 2 
> years (since Aug.2000), except that famous "we couldn't care less" press 
> release on kde.org (don't remember exactly what that was response to, I guess 
> - to GNOME foundation?)

Don't forget that we constantly make statements in the form of content on
www.kde.org, the source code we deliver, the press announcements etc.

> May be, right solution was *not to have* OT mailing list on kde.org, from the 
> beginning.  Solution to kick off kde-cafe from kde.org was BAD, inmy opinion, 
> and not in line with KDE's open-source nature.

You see, that's a perfect example where a clear definition of KDE's
"nature" would have been helpful. You saw it violated when the list was
moved. Others appearantly saw it disturbed as long it was there.

Harri.