Voting rights - the GNOME way

[Navindra Umanee]

Harri Porten <porten@trolltech.com> wrote:
> Do you have personal experience with either of them ? I'd be curious learn
> about them.

I was a long time Debian user and I hung around the Debian devel lists
for a long time actually.  Then like many, I got rather discouraged by
the whole political nature of the process.

They talk about elections and all that stuff as if it's really
important, but it's not.  Whenever you hear about Debian it's often
about who has been elected or who is going to be elected or who is
going to do the electing.  It's ridiculous.  They spend a lot of time
sending descriptions of candidates, why you should vote for this or
that, it reduces to bickering or cheer-leading, and although it's all
totally irrelevant, everyone feels good about it because they can hold
their own in thread discussions of epic proportions.  It seems to me
the more political and craftier you are, the more important you
become, and the better for all.  In the end, the bottom line is simply
that they don't manage to produce stable releases in a timely manner.

At one point I sent in my application for Debian developer.  I jumped
through all their red tape and even mailed someone my photo ID and
documentation.  I learned the basics of dpkg and even packaged some
some stuff.  After months and then years I didn't hear anything at all
from them.  Like many, I just dropped out in disgust.  I got tired of
all the politics and endless discussion on the lists anyway.  It was
just exhausting, but what else could you expect from a project that
was fundamentally political in nature and organization?

> But let's look at the trademark for example. We need a legal entity to own
> the trademark and that is one of the reasons why KDE e.V. was founded. Who

On one hand I admit I would like to ignore these matters, on the other
hand I have to say that part of the dot being copyrighted by KDE e.V.
does raise some personal issues for me.  

But as far as I know, this matter has already been taken care of
anyway, and nobody really had any say anyway.
http://www.kde.org/kde-ev/ has a description of what the requirements
are to join, although I don't know what real the current status of KDE
e.V. is.  The last I heard from KDE e.V., they were busy shutting down
the kde-cafe list without a single public explanation from them.

> should be a member in this organization, though ? Keep in mind that
> posession of the trademark brings with it the power over and 
> responsibility for the content on www.kde.org and assignment of @kde.org 
> mail aliases for example.

When kde.org was managed by a few trusty persons like Martin, it
seemed to work out fine.  They had a few simple rules as to who got a
CVS account, who got a mail address, who could use a kde.org hostname
and it was all fine and dandy.  If there was a problem, explanations
were asked and given, the CVS account was closed or whatever and that
was that. This was a nice arrangment and everyone trusts Martin and
company.  They were essentially the maintainer of these services, and
this was all operated in typical Open Source fashion.

Now it's becoming complicated and the level of bickering and
self-importance is rising.  I'm not sure why, but I guess it's a
natural progression of a growing project which has created a
significant body of work.

Cheers,
Navin.