Re: A Call For Open Governance Of X Development

>From:[email protected]>
>To: Steve Swales <[email protected]>
>Cc: [email protected], Alan Coopersmith <[email protected]>, Steve 
Swales <[email protected]>
>Subject: Re: [forum] A Call For Open Governance Of X Development

On Mon, 24 Mar 2003 16:21:52 -0500  Havoc Pennington <wrote:
>
>On Mon, Mar 24, 2003 at 12:15:44PM -0800, Steve Swales wrote: 
>> As the current Chairperson of X.Org, you have my personal invitation to 
>> participate, and my personal promise that X.Org is committed to 
>> reforming itself into whatever the community feels it should be, as the 
>> stewardship body for the X standard. 
>
>Thanks for that!
>
>> Having said that, I feel that this will not be an easy thing to do,
>> but I am encouraged by the recent track record of other
>> organizations which have successfully pursued the goals of free and
>> open stewardship, while at the same time offering sufficient value
>> for participation by a broad set of corporate (i.e. paying)
>> sponsors.
>
>For the GNOME Foundation, we spent significant time discussing how to
>incent companies to support the foundation and its activities, while
>still ensuring that decisions were made for purely technical reasons.
>
>We were unable to come up with a solution. Quite simply, if paying a
>fee does not mean more say in the organization, we are left with "you
>should support the organization because its work needs doing and
>benefits you" - which has a significant freeloader problem.  Still,
>this is what we did for the GNOME Foundation for lack of alternatives.
>
>I don't think we should beat around the bush. For me, and I believe
>for many others, having anyone other than "all interested technical
>domain experts" involved in decision-making is simply broken. Not only
>is it wrong in a big picture sense, it is also bad for the companies
>themselves in the long run. I want to see Red Hat benefit from correct
>technical decisions, and would like safeguards to protect us from our
>own inevitable silliness as we become a larger company.
>
>I would focus on two questions:
>
> 1) What ideas do people have to ensure X.org funding while completely
>    eliminating the ability to buy technical influence? [1]
>
> 2) If we have no ideas, is X.org willing to drop pay-for-say?
>
>Speaking for myself only, I would not support any form of X.org that
>maintains pay-for-say. My personal guesstimate of the open source
>community's views is that they will agree and that GNOME and KDE would
>be willing to actively ignore a pay-for-say X.org if we had an
>alternative open organization to turn to. I could be wrong, and people
>may change their minds, including me. But the presumption against
>pay-for-say is very, very high.

Havoc - Why should a judgement of "pay-for-say" be any different for X.Org 
than for GNOME foundation?

>
>
>I propose that we set a hard deadline for discussion and decision on
>X.org, or it will drag on forever.

There are a lot of practical reasons for resolving this very quickly, but I 
don't know who is the "we" who would set it. X.Org, with the participation 
of an XFree86 representative, have (as Steve indicated) already begun.

>
>Finally, I'd point you to the suggestion in the GNOME/KDE joint
>statement that our primary open source X implementation be under the
>same umbrella as our X standards organization.

I agree this is an important suggestion, which which for my part, as an 
X.Org member, I would take into account. GNOME/KDE community opinion is (and 
has been) very welcome.

Leon

>
>Havoc
>
>[1] One possible idea is pay-to-use-the-trademark instead of 
>pay-to-design-the-specs. i.e. a certification program.
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