Hi,
I write to you all today on a solemn matter, one which I fear will be forgotten and ignored if nobody starts some discussion on this.
Earlier this week, some of you may have noticed that for a very short time there was a rather angry post by Philip Van Hoof, he sounded quite frustrated and disturbed and the title of his post basically said to please remove him from the Planet GNOME feeds.
Unfortunately this blog post was even deleted from his own blog, so there is nothing to refer to here, also it was gone so fast that I have a hunch many Planet GNOME readers did not get a chance to see what was going on.
What I want to highlight in this post is not this frustrated angry post by Philip, but rather the precursor which seems to have led us to this sad turn of events.
Let’s make things better
In late May this summer, Philip submitted the post “Let’s make things better“. This post is also deleted from his own blog, I’m not sure for what reasons, I’m keeping the link alive here incase Philip feels inspired enough to at reactivate that post (it would help for people to see this in perspective, as people who have not read that entry may suspect it contained rudeness or bad language or sweeping accusations or something, which simple was not the case at all).
Yes, a lot of you readers know about that post, many of you would probably prefer I don’t bring it up, but the problem is that many people just don’t know what happened. Also the result of him deleting his post is that people don’t get any chance to verify these false claims of indecency which were aimed towards him for writing a very sensible post.
What I can say, is that the post did not use any distasteful language, he was not rude and did not single anyone out or blame anyone, he just said some really sensible things which happened to annoy a certain few members of our community.
I think the critical part which made people react irrationally to his prose, ran something like:
“Maybe if we spent a little less time on outreach, and a little bit more on development…”
And went on from there, he was basically arguing that our efforts on sustaining programs such as OPW are not a part of our mission, and that maybe our attention would be better spent writing excellent software (I’ll be happy if the post re-appears so people can read it in it’s integrity, as I don’t have a copy anymore).
I think, given the turn of events, this recent post by Philip requesting to be removed was a final attempt to try to do something good for a community that just keeps telling him that his views are wrong, dirty, and need to be censored, i.e. he got a lot of flak from the community at large for absolutely no good reason at all – if anyone needs to be ashamed, it’s us, as a community, for failing him.
I’m looking at you
It’s generally bad form to name people in public, however the wider GNOME community needs to know what is really going on in this case and they will not have the evidence to judge for themselves without references. That said these are only a couple of excerpts from the circus of public shaming which followed Philip’s perfectly reasonable blog post.
Paolo Borelli makes a response to someone who quoted Philip’s blog in a positive light on a public mailing list, and he goes out of his way to mention his public opposition to Philip speaking his mind:
“However you also started off by citing Philip’s blog post and honestly I found that post wrong and disturbing”
Taken in context of the mail thread, it looks as though the original poster is to be considered lucky to be taken seriously in any measure, just for referring to the said blog post which puts a little scrutany on our GNOME identity as an outreach foundation.
Paolo, really ? I would never have expected this behavior, do you really feel it’s necessary to call Philip’s call to reevaluate our position on these matter as “wrong and disturbing” ?
We have a long history you and I, I thought I knew you better than that.
Alberto Ruiz takes it a step further, again taking a public stance against Philip:
“I’ve been asked to remove your blog by several people and I’ve reached the conclusion that it would be a really bad idea because
it would set the wrong precedence and it would shift the discussion to the wrong topic (censorship yadda yadda). Questioning OPW should be allowed.
The problem with your post is that if not questioned by other people (as many have done already) it would send the wrong message to the public and prospect GSoC, OPW and general contributors. Your blog was the wrong place to question and your wording makes it clear that you have misunderstandings about how the community works.”
Alberto, I’m disappointed in you. There is no censorship on Planet GNOME, you know that, I know that, and asides from one silly “upskirt” incident in the history of Planet GNOME, this has never caused any issues.
Moreover, it is simply not your call, or anyone’s call to make, to decide that a long time member of our community’s politely and consicely formed opinion be censored from Planet GNOME just because it disagrees with what some of the other members think.
It is not your call to say that people should not be questioning things on Planet GNOME, especially since that is EXACTLY where it will be heard. Have you considered that he takes this issue very seriously and has decided, as is his right, to raise the matter for open public discussion ? Public discussion on the direction of GNOME is what we do in GNOME, we are the foundation and contributors and public discussion needs to happen about critical matters in order for us, the public, to make good decisions about the future of GNOME.
Finally, Emmanuele Bassi, I know his recent post was pretty “out there”, anyone would expect him to be frustrated after the treatment this community has given him, the public shaming and insolence this community has shown him by taking such an opposed stance against his expressing himself would be enough to drive anyone nuts.
Don’t you think, though, that his post was a last-effort attempt to be heard and be a positive influence for change in GNOME ?
Do you really think this immediate response to a frustrated blog post was the correct way to diffuse the situation ?
Really, we should do better to protect our own, Philip obviously had a rough time in the last couple months, his blog post was not an excuse to quickly sweep him under the rug, but a challenge to call people to action and actually openly discuss change.
If we don’t have people like Philip who are at least willing to fight for our ability to openly discuss things, then I fear the worst for this community in the long run.
Moral of the story guys… Please get a grip, I’m really not impressed with how people have responded to Philip this summer, it could have equally been any of you, and if you had something important to share, I would be equally disappointed if the community had so aggressively shouted you down.
And no, I was never a proponent of the CoC effort, but please guys at least try to remember the first rule: Assume that others mean well.
All the best.
Amendment
Today someone pointed out that since the original post at the end of may is missing, noone can form an opinion of their own. I did not have access to it at the time but another commentor was kind enough to paste a copy:
Matthew gets that developers need good equipment.Glade, Scaffolding (DevStudio), Scintilla & GtkSourceView, Devhelp, gnome-build and Anjuta also got it earlier.I think with GNOME’s focus on this and a bit less on woman outreach programs; this year we could make a difference.Luckily our code is that good that it can be reused for what is relevant today.It’s all about what we focus on.Can we please now go back at making software?ps. I’ve been diving in Croatia. Trogir. It was fantastic. I have some new reserves in my mental system.ps. Although we’re very different I have a lot of respect for your point of view, Matthew.
So … that was what that all was about? That is sad. I always appreciated Philips work. Specially because I am one of those contributors who actually really only care about the code. I also wondered whether it probably wouldn’t make more sense to sponsor already well-skilled and involved developers to allow them to invest some extra hours into gnome instead the outreach program. Not saying it is useless. I appreciate the work mimico did in order to ease the entrance in using gtk with vala during her turn for instance. But I wonder what a developer like Hergert could do when we sponsor him to work on builders for a little longer.
Basically, in case I’d have a blog on our planet, chances are quite high that the shit storm would have appeared upon me instead. I find this idea very troublesome. The way Philip was threatened definitely lets me wonder whether I invest time in the wrong community. I appreciate your post.
The content of the deleted post can be found here:
http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=QSw7tMJd
@Anonymous: Yes, that one is still available in some caches
To be clear, that is the frustrated and angry post from a few days ago, not the level headed and constructive post written at the end of May.
For many years I’ve lurked PGO and various developer mailing lists. There are some great people in the community that I would like to work with. However, there are also a lot of people in the “core” cabal who brook no dissent, and there’s a lot of political and social justice crap that I just don’t care to deal with.
Having been a GNOME user since the 1.X days and being a developer by trade, I keep thinking to myself “I should do GNOME development”. I ping a few people on G+ or by email with an idea, get rudely smacked down with no real discussion, and remember why I don’t bother. There’s a real distaste for dealing with users and an in-the-bunker mentality that probably originated from the criticism shitstorm around the release of GNOME 3.
There are so many other positive, merit-oriented projects to work on that don’t have tons of baggage and crap to wade through before you can make a real contribution. I’ll just keep on putting my time towards those.
As a member of the “wider GNOME community” you mention, this post is pretty surreal. I read Phillip’s “Let’s make things better” post when it appeared on Planet GNOME, and I found it worryingly flippant and unconstructive. There is no dilemma involved, this is not an either you spend time run the OPW or you spend time to develop software situation.
I don’t know what went on behind the scenes, and I’m unconvinced by the “references” you gave (Alberto’s post in particular was level-headed and constructive; the quote from Paolo is telling in its incompleteness), but you can’t post something like that and feel victimised when you get flak in return.
Also, you write as if the GNOME community doesn’t want to, or hasn’t, discussed the relationship between GNOME and OPW. Just recently I read an article on LWN about such a discussion occuring on foundation-list.
If Phillip does indeed want to be heard and make a positive influence on GNOME he’s going about it in a very poor way. You can only assume somebody means well until they prove you wrong.
Finally, we can’t forget GNOME is not just a techinical project, but a social and political one too, like the Free Software movement it was born from.
The post written at the end of May:
http://pastebin.com/qQgvmiDu
And in a comment he wrote:
“I think software developers in general will be more attracted to
(working on) the GNOME platform when we have better development tools.
That includes woman. I think focus, time and money is better spent on
improving the tools than on outreach programs.”
I agree with that.
For the OPW, I’m also in favor of _equal_ human rights. With OPW, (1) womens have the privilege to be paid to work on the documentation, translations, design etc. GSoC is only for programming. (2) GSoC is only for students. It seems that OPW is not only for students, but I may be wrong. In the OPW description page there is no mention of the term “student”:
https://gnome.org/opw/
There was also a discussion this week with pvanhoof on the #gtk+ channel.
Philip also said that GNOME should focus only on software (what we are good at). Philosophy can be handled by the FSF or other organizations.
@G: It’s sad but I tend to agree that we had it really good before GNOME 3 and all of it’s politics got in the way of simply creating excellent software.
Things went down hill since, for some unexplained reason: the long needed API break for houscleaning of GTK+-3 somehow turned into a marketing fiasco.
Somebody said “Oh well if you increment the version number, there better be a lot of features right !?” and then it wasnt us doing GTK+3 for the love of the toolkit anymore – it somehow rudely got transformed into “Lets do GNOME 3”.
The worst thing to come from all of this is that we lost our module proposal period, where maintainers of various projects would have death matches on d-d-l and the emerging winner might be chosen as the “officially blessed toaster for GNOME”.
Personally, I still suspect to this day that module proposal period was removed so that gnome-shell could be added to the release, because it would have taken years of development before we all agreed that it was ready to be included in the official modulesets (it sounds like a crazy conspiricy theory, but I don’t have a better explanation for what happened).
We’ve lost a lot of transparency because of this, and a lot of my own confidence, however I’m invested in GNOME, so I have to believe that this can be a passing phase, and we will own our community again one day… which is why I must encourage those who have the guts to speak up to stay around and weather out the storm.
And why would you ? To protect the code. Over 10 years of really nice code, the creation of GObject, introspection, vala, the tooling around these technologies, the libraries developped around these, used by various companies, sustaining a hand full of consulting companies who sell themselves as being experts on the tech… this is what has to be protected – gnome shell and “The GNOME Desktop” is just a demo for the really great stuff in our stack – we can’t afford for it to be the other way around.
Ugh, anyway I’ve probably said more than necessary, you hit a nerve on a day that I already had my nerves exposed.
@Josh, Yes there was this discussion:
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2014-August/msg00004.html
I followed every email at the time, I’m not sure I can say that Ryan’s concerns have really been addressed, but for the most part people behaved well.
As for my finger pointing, I really would not have singled out Paulo or Alberto for this if I did not see it as a serious problem, these are people I expect to laugh with about this while drinking beer together on a future date when this sillyness is behind us.
But seriously, yes Alberto was tactful about saying that you are not allowed to criticise OPW on Planet GNOME, but if you read the text you will find it is quite exactly what was said, masked behind an introduction of “I’ve been requested by several people to have you removed from planet, but I don’t believe in censorship”.
The point here is that GNOME is not primarily an outreach foundation, and anyone who dares to propose we focus more on what really matters for GNOME instead of outreach, will be publicly shamed in this way, as if his post was in any way inappropriate, it was not.
Things have changed a lot in the last years, we need to seriously consider our direction as a community lest that direction be dictated to us by a vocal minority. And if people are going to lash out at you simply because you are suggesting something they don’t like, well, that’s a quite far away from what I would call “civilized behaviour”.
I remember the original post, and having read the more recent angry incoherent rant, I think the maintainers of Planet GNOME did the right thing by taking away an amplifying platform for such rants. Constructive criticism is welcome. Offensive rants are not.
I also read the original post and remember being quite confused at how the responses he received completely missed the point.
There was constructive criticism and he wasn’t against the idea of participating in the OPW program. He was against the idea of managing it. It is unfortunate that the post has been deleted because if you look at the responses you will get the wrong idea.
I also saw his recent post and I am not completely surprised at how he feels.
He grew frustrated with the direction of the project. He felt that the project should get back to basics. He felt that all contributors should have the opportunity to gain sponsorship for their contributions. He felt that gnome as a whole needed to scale down and build itself back up and once that happens it would have more financial security to contribute to OPW funding and do so in a bigger way than it is currently capable of doing.
None of the people who were condescending towards him actually discussed anything with him. They didn’t try and understand what it was he was saying.
He was essentially put into the misogynist category when that clearly was not his stance. I would be pissed if a community I had contributed a large portion of my life to bundled me into groups I despise as well.
The angry post is gone but I think its worth mentioning that he had tagged it with about 7 different #condescending tags. Maybe that was his way of parodying people he thought were his friends.
There was nothing offensive about what he originally posted. I certainly understand how it got to the point where he had to just say he is done. No point in being part of a community like this.
I know I should not be leaving this comment, and I’ll likely hate myself come next morning, but I honestly feel I should at least correct the most glaring misunderstandings in the text above, since some of them are pretty critical.
first of all, saying that we should “just care about software” is a pretty fundamental and egregious misunderstanding of what the GNOME project does. we do not “make software”; if we wanted to just do that, then we’d be writing a proprietary OS, or releasing everything under BSD licenses. we are a social project. we want our software to empower other users, and we want other users to come join the effort, and we use our code as a way to attain that.
this leads to the obvious consequence (and yet another misunderstanding from your side) that the GNOME Foundation is, in fact, an outreach organization. we want more users, and we want users to be aware of Free Software. since we pretty much exhausted the reserves of white male geeks, getting more people that do not conform to that demographic is an obvious outreach step to get more users, and more contributors, to the cause.
there’s also the general issue of hypocrisy in your last paragraph; you don’t like the code of conduct, but you assume that other people should respect it. guess what: that’s what the code of conduct is. sadly, we don’t have any way to enforce it because of people like you. I honestly think we should — it would allow us to rewrite it properly, to get nebulous wording out of the way, like “assume otheres mean well”, which only works in a context of dubious wording. pray tell, what’s dubious in “you all suck”? some hidden meaning in those words that I, and other people missed?
finally, I ask you (like I asked Philip multiple times) to use my name, not another one. my name is on Planet GNOME, on my blog, my emails, and my commits on Git; it ought to be just common courtesy to at least get it right, if you’re trying to do a character assassination.
I’ll leave the conspiracy theories about GNOME Shell, the external module proposal, and the OPW where they are; I don’t even want to dignify them by addressing them.
the only thing I can say is: if you don’t like the direction of the GNOME project, you’re welcome to do exactly one of these two things: you can try to change it, or you can leave the project. be prepared, though: if you try to change it to an uncaring, unsafe environment where “everything goes” because we ought to care only about the pieces of code and middleware we make, and not about the social implications of what we do and why we do it, then I will fight you and all those that think like you — alone if necessary, but I already know it won’t come to that — and guess what? I will win.
Tristan: thank you for putting this out in the open. I hope it starts a positive and constructive discussion to fix what needs fixing.
I had seen Philips’ latest post and to me it seemed to be about venting his frustration. As a GNOME user it’s a bit troubling to read about the reactions his fellow developers had. Hopefully all parties involved realize that this is not the right path.
If there is one thing I have learned over the years then it’s that Communication is king. Lack thereof is a one way ticket to things falling apart. And it seems that’s what’s happening here.
With our digital borderless age having taken over, face-to-face contact is almost a rarity. To prevent developers from sinking in the quick sand of their own frustration and solitude perhaps some resources could be focused on getting people on the same page again? Perhaps something like weekly video sessions to decrease the distance, increase compassion, mutual understanding and strengthen shared goals?
@Emmanuele: I’m sorry for having misspelled your name.
We disagree on a great many things, you think the “GNOME Desktop” is important, I think the GNOME Desktop is a “demo” of our stack, which is what is important.
I think that the great majority of people we’ve ammassed in the last decade to work with us on free software are interested in developping free software simply because it’s challenging, and is of a higher standard of quality than anything corporate that we manage to barely churn out before release date.
Furthermore, the GNOME Foundation is an umbrella foundation for various projects that are interrelated in some ways, what these distinctly separate modules/projects share in common is mostly the free software license, in that single aspect we are united, this is good enough to be able to produce excellent software, and yes, for us, for GNOME, that is all that matters in the end. I can see that you would like the GNOME foundation to be something more, but saying it loudly many times will not make it so.
In any case, you’ve made your position pretty clear – I can see that you think this situation with Philip is not one that needed to be diffused, discussed and remedied. You probably even think it’s acceptable to tell people to not criticize OPW on Planet GNOME because censorship serves your purpose today.
I could go on, Emmanuele, I know you dislike me, it’s alright, I’m truely starting to dislike you as well, on this we can agree – and I admire your confidence in presuming that you will win, instead I still have hope that we will get our precious, open and transperent GNOME back.
Remember the worst that can happen: We can get all caught up in this outreach stuff, place value on the Desktop Environment instead of on the stack where it belongs, and a huge amount of code that was produced from 1998 – 2010, may become irrelevent, that, is the single worst thing that can happen, to tell us that all our work in the end was for nothing except for a fancy Desktop demo and some cheap sponsorship programs.
And now my position is clear too.
@Emannuelle: losers dont win. And your name is gay.
@Emmanuele –
To be honest at this point I think your full of it. You don’t care about outreach.
I have spoken countless times with you on irc about trying to make it easier for users to donate to developers of the stack and how an important goal for the foundation should be to make it possible and transparent for users to sponsor developers so they can contribute code and remain financially secure without needing to join company x and I just get condescending remarks about users being too cheap to donate and budgets being stretched as it is.
Talk about transparency gets attacked on the mailing list as if it causes offence. Talk about having a more sustainable model for handling accounts for different software projects gets ignored. Talk about gnomes charter gets shut down.
It was brought up on the foundation list that maybe the foundation should accept bitcoin, the response was that if the foundation accepted bitcoin then it would be audited and its non-profit status may be taken away. That doesn’t fill people with confidence.
You’re entire attitude is us vs them. The group of people you like and socialize with vs everyone else. That’s not a community and you aren’t fooling anyone. You cant be a dick 99% of the time and then say that you are the defender of all things good.
Whether those people are part of gnome, kde, etc. It doesn’t matter. There are countless threads you contribute to all over the web where you insult people left right and center.
Gnome is first and foremost software. Making sure the community of developers have their voice heard and feel that they are in a safe environment is important nobody is debating that. NOBODY.
What people had started to notice was that gnome is not as popular as it once was for users or developers and working on changing that should be first priority so that the foundation can become financially capable of committing more resources to outreach in general, including OPW.
Coming here and saying I will fight you and I will win is childish and exactly the problem people have been alluding to.
You’re not curing cancer and your not feeding starving children so stop acting like you or the foundation are, its time to be realistic and stop hiding behind buzzwords.
It’s time to stop making people who try and speak up look like villains so you can be the hero.
Your being paid to write code, you choose to insult people. You choose to turn your back on people contributing independently. You don’t give an f.
How many years did you spend on clutter, how many years on gtk. If the community were to turn on you tomorrow and villanise you for sharing your ideas how would you react.
” if you try to change it to an uncaring, unsafe environment where “everything goes” because we ought to care only about the pieces of code and middleware we make, and not about the social implications of what we do and why we do it, then I will fight you and all those that think like you — alone if necessary, but I already know it won’t come to that — and guess what? I will win”
Who wanted gnome to be an uncaring, unsafe environment? This says more about you than it does anyone else. Did you read this aloud as you wrote it? Making up imaginary villains so you can be a hero. It’s sad.
At this point I want nothing to do with you or this joke of a platform anymore.
Hopefully you get your way in the end so that a few more years down the line when you have pushed enough people away with your behavior you will realize how it indirectly cost you a large portion of your life developing a toolkit nobody wants to use anymore.
Personally I would much rather donate my money to a real charity than a group of privileged middle aged self-aggrandizing white men from red hat who are so desperate for attention and power that they are actively and deliberately shutting out entire demographics to attain it.
This is getting ugly, basically because everyone is trying to win the battle here…a battle which started by Philips blog post…he was trying to make a point but in a completely wrong way which to me was nothing but a war declaration against everyone! and when you start a war, no one cares about the points you were trying to make and all you can expect is seeing people fighting you back…
And he made it all worse by his last blog post…
—
OPW can work because it’s more like an advertising program which is something you’ll never get by paying people to just code something that no one will see!
And yes…if you just pay x, then you should pay y too, and guess what? you can’t… and it will be another mess all again…
that’s why you should spend the money in the right way…
> @Emannuelle: losers dont win. And your name is gay.
(Note, I’m a different Emanuele, with just one “m” and neither of us has so many “n”s and “l”s.)
Tristan, I can understand your point of view even if I don’t agree with it, but seeing that the above is the kind of comments your post solicits should make you question your position.
Here’s someone thinking that “gay” is something that one can say to hurt someone else. Once you get to *oppose* efforts to make GNOME more inclusive, rather than plainly ignore them, you give the message that any deviation from the white-straight-male can be used to insult people.
I guess that’s not what you meant, but given the current status of the Internet that’s exactly how many people will perceive your position and the message I quoted just proves it.
And to be more on topic: the Foundation is not a technical organization. It doesn’t decide how GNOME is developed or where developers should concentrate their efforts. Emmanuele was right on the spot when he defined it as a social organization.
Which means that if anyone wants to improve our developer tools as you often did I’m sure the Foundation and everyone here will be very happy about it. Rather than oppose better developer tools I’m sure everyone in GNOME will be very supportive if anyone wants to spend some time on it (but please be patient, reviewing patches is one of the most difficult and less rewarding jobs).
The Foundation Board, democratically elected by all Foundation members, has decided to invest some of its time (and some money, but most of it comes from other organizations) in a area where GNOME and the Free Software ecosystem is greatly lacking.
Even without any intervention of the Foundation we’ve seen many efforts to improve our development tools, and you and Emmanuele have great contributions in this regard, so it makes *a lot* of sense for the Foundation to intervene in other areas where there has not been any progress in decades.
I hope everyone had the same courage and determination as Christian Hergert in putting their efforts where their mouth is. He’s the living proof that improving developer tools and running outreach programs like OPW are two faces of the same medal.
When I read post from Philip Van Hoof first I think was “At least! Somebody say it!”
@John mchugh say everything I want to say, so I wrote only few words as an user.
I like GNOME for years, since I was 13 I use it.. but since GNOME 3 come, something is obviously wrong! @Emmanuele and others you are man with power of making decisions, but you have to listen community.. the way of telling comunity whats wrong and right only by your opinion is highway to hell..look at Ubuntu, which choose this way, they dont listen people, and people go to other distros, because they dont care about their “cool hipster” marketing.
You can fight with community or ignore it, but guess what? They WILL WIN!!!
People want great software, no more women,no more events where nothing happend.. just simple working piece of software.. and GNOME is now just broken beta..
Thats all I want to say.. thank you.
@Emmanuele
As someone who maintains and started a project under the LGPL in our project, I’d like to ask you not to confuse my choice as a statement. I just picked it for one reason: I don’t care about the license and it was the one I thought other expect. I would indeed use the Beerware-licence nowadays. Thats how much I care.
Also, please don’t start a war. I know those are trendy nowadays, but I rather not see one in a community — including you — I adore. I am afraid this one is going somewhere no one will win.
@Mike
Your respect for different languages and their names is astonishing. I rather not say what comes to my mind when I read your quote in combination with yours. Mostly because I already feel stupid to think along this path.
Dude, have you met Philip Van Hoof? The same day he wrote his “good bye cause I know better and you guys really suck” post, he messaged me privately, where he presumed a lot of things about me and insulted me in many ways. Of course I can’t share that chat to everyone as I dont have his permission but I did share it with my friends of g+. I’ll add you to that circle (I’d like to think we are friends?) so you can see what kind of person we are dealing with here.
For the record, I really do believe that pvanhoof means well but that is not always enough to be able to tolerate someone.
Out of curiosity, Tristan, did you see the conversation / monolog / rant in #gtk+ in the early hours of Sep 11?
@Emanuele: I didnt mean to hurt anyone even “Emmanuele”. That was sarcasm.
Anyway, back to the point. I think the whole outreach argument is just plain wrong and this is slowly killing GNOME. If you want to reach women, go the bar. If you want to reach users, contributors, male or female, black, brown yellow or white, short or tall: write great software. Write software that will empower the users. Do it and do it honestly: target your “natural” userbase first, the people that brought you where you are, and make your software so good that the “larger” userbase will feel at home.
You cannot deny the fact GNOME is where it is today because developers, cs students, sys admins, etc. used GNOME because it provided them a rich and powerful GUI to work with. It was the best system for the tasks they needed to accomplish.
However, at some point, some GNOME members decided to turn their back on these people. Nobody can deny this. GNOME3 was not adopted by many GNOME distributions and many other distributions just dropped GNOME entirely. These members thought it was a better idea to make GNOME so neutral that their mom could use it. Unfortunately, it didn’t work for their mom, and GNOME became so neutral that it doesnt empower its userbase anymore. It lost all its flexibility. GNOME became castrating. Some GNOME members thought they knew better than the rest of the world even if the whole Internet disagreed.
Stop being hypocrite and “listen” to the users. If you do that, users will come to you and then contributors will come to you.
@Emanuele Aina:
By accident I’ve, in the last couple of minutes, been trying to understand some things in the first part of your comment, which I found interesting.
Summarising, I believe that one of the things you are saying is that a group of people see “*opposing* efforts to make GNOME more inclusive, rather than plainly ignore them” as the message that “any deviation from the white-straight-male can be used to insult people”, is this correct?
You go on by saying that this group consists of many people, and as a proof for that you refer to one of the comments above. Of course I cannot accept this as proof because many is more than one, but still I am very much interested in the size of this group; I hope it is small. Do you have any well-founded estimates on its size; surely and hopefully it is not the majority of people?
Next I believe that (let us assume the group is relatively large) you ask Tristan to question his position. I am wondering whether you hope that his questioning would lead to him changing this position?
I have been thinking about how I would answer the previous question. It is very strange: suppose a person has a well-meant opinion with which he absolutely has no intention of harming anyone. If, after posting their opinion on the internet, people use it to do harm, should then the person change his opinion because of that?
Instinctively I would say no no no NO!
But I can also see where you are coming from. In any case I believe it is important to understand that the person himself does not mean harm.
@Emanuele Aina: Hi.
First of all, I appreciate your comment, it’s intellectually challenging and I can see you mean well.
There are a couple of things I need to clarify in response, one of them is that obviously there are now multiple topics flying around and it’s important to keep them separate.
First and foremost, this post is about the apparent lack of tollerence towards anyone who dares to challenge OPW, or suggest that we need to steer our project in any direction which does not support OPW to the maximum capacity, apparently “A little less outreach and a little more software” was so offensive that people actually asked to have his blog removed.
Secondly, yes, I have vented in my comments some of my points of view in response to other comments, I am not hiding my point of view, it’s a little off topic so I should not write a whole essay here on those personal points of view. Suffice it to say that I don’t think outreach is a bad thing in general, if it were run like any other software project in GNOME, and did not receive preferential treatment from the board in terms of budget and more importantly focus, logistics, etc, if the goals of the outreach project did not outweigh the goals of any other project under the GNOME umbrella, then we probably would not be having this conversation.
Third, your logic is fatally flawed in telling me that I should reconsider my position because of the type of comments that are made on my blog post in response to Emmanuele’s rant.
This last bit is the part I found intellectually challenging and I thank you for that, however I would not take any stance or position if I did not feel it was important to do so. Changing my position just because of some wise cracks made by a third party on my blog would be really small of me, I would have to be a really shallow person if I changed my point of view because someone might percieve me in some unintended light.
Finally, as you mentioned the Foundation itself does not direct the projects which are a part of GNOME, it supports the project as a whole and we place our trust in the Foundation to look after all of our interests. It is not the place of the Foundation Board to be allocating resources to their own side project, and if the OPW is indeed a project supported by the Foundation like any other project, then the board needs to be transparent about it’s efforts there, and the foundation has to be fair to all of the other software projects which are also citizens of GNOME.
tristan,
It’s really unfortunate that you decided to write this particular post after philip self-selectedly removed his own blog posts at the heart of this discussion.
Deliberately citing to dead links at the time of publication of an article is generally a bad faith action in scholarly circles. Its one thing if a link breaks after you publish..but to cite a known broken link as reference material.. well it doesn’t really look great. And the whole thrust of this article relies on your readership being able to read the material in those links. Without that context, the editorial story arc you are trying to present about the resulting reactions from other people just doesn’t hold together.
Without the original posts to read in context with the selective reactions.. its impossible to adequately form my own opinion, as a reader of your post, as to whether your opinion with regard to the appropriateness of any other person’s particular reaction is itself an overeaction to their reaction. You’ve set yourself up in opposition to people you call out in your post..but you give me no means as to judge…because its fundmentally about the original post in may that you link to that does not exist.
And really, if you didn’t re-read afresh the post from May, that now no longer exists for anyone to read, how can I be sure that your reaction right now is is genuine well founded and that you aren’t misremembering what was actually written, the exact words used, the tone.. all of it. Relying on the memory of something you read.. months ago.. is also generally a terrible way to have a discussion. Doubly-so for something that generated noticeable emotions. Your emotional response will color the factual memory. Without the original source material as a reference, how can you be sure you are remembering the text in detail enough to really evaluate if someone else’s opinion of the article is off the mark?
I’m mean I’m all about beating the dead horse,..when the horse there on the side of the road. But this sure feels more like beating the memory of the dead horse to death. With the original blog posts taken down from the blog philip controls, philip has chosen to remove the necessary information to have any further constructive discussion. Or even a useful meta discussion about the discussion he generated. What this blog post here is just emotional venting. And well that sort of exactly the opposite of constructive discussion.
Perhaps you’ll think about it a little bit, about how the lack of original source material curtails useful discussion beyond emotion venting, and choose to delete this post as well. And maybe take a little time to figure out a way to start a new discussion using your own voice, that doesn’t necessarily reference the ghost of philip’s now very dead horse.
-jef
@Jef Spaleta: Someone was kind enough to post a copy in some of the first comments here, I’ve ammended the blog to include that copy so hopefully others won’t miss it.
However, you will have to just take my word, and swilmet’s word, that the text is accurate.
As a nearly 28 year old man who has been reading planet.gnome.org since around the time I was a 14 year old boy, I would like to say a few things. First, I saw Philip Van Hoof’s post, and I have to say that I have sympathy for the frustration he is facing. Particularly with the harassment. This post also makes things personal, but that’s not what I want to talk about.
I make a living programming. II have always been inspired and amazed by the GNOME community, but I have not seen very many opportunities to work with GNOME technologies other than a few small patches years ago and some personal projects that are published, but mostly unused. I’ve been busy with school, and then getting started earning a living in pay on delivery software projects, then more school, and now again trying to get the ball rolling again so I can quit selling so many bitcoin. I would like to contribute to GNOME, but I can’t afford to donate time until I have positive cashflow unless I know it can lead to paying work. As I male who is no longer a student, I have no idea how I could obtain sponsorship to do that kind of work. There doesn’t seem to be an outreach program that supports me in finding a job working on GNOME. I suppose I could start applying to distributions, but I prefer working harder for less time over a full time position with a company. If anyone knows an organization that can help me help them, larry at yrral dot net.
@Larry Reaves, many organizations are hiring, there was a post not too long ago from Sumana: http://www.harihareswara.net/sumana/2014/03/06/0
And if you get good with any of Wayland, GStreamer or WebKit I’m sure it won’t be long before landing a job in one of those organizations.
What I don’t get is why OPW should have anything to do with Philip’s frustration. Is it because OPW is incentivizing a demographic which does not include him? I guess he’s no longer a student, so is GSOC equally frustrating?
Also I’m not sure about the harassment he received: while he seemed to be ok to use strong words against others, all of the blog posts against Philip cited by Tristan seems to use a far more polite tone. Strong disagreement yes, harassment maybe not.
@Mike Barker, sorry, but if you really think that I can believe that your message was sarcasm you’re offending my intelligence. If you want me to take you seriously I think that apologizing to Emmanuele would be a good place to start, and I’d beg you to avoid such kind of “sarcasm” in future communications where I may or may not be involved.
On top of that I’d like to point out that GNOME is *technically* where is today because of the hard work of the people that Tristan cited to be against Philip. Emmanuele, Paolo and Zeeshan are top contributors since a long time, and many other OPW supporters are too (my perception is that *most* of them are OPW supporters). If we were voting by the value of the code produced they would easily win, despite Tristan and Philip big contributions.
@Fikkie, an old saying says that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Yes, I think that seeing how an idea can be misinterpreted may be considered a good reason to change idea. At least it shows that it needs to be made more clear.
So, in the spirit of making things crystal clear: everyone here agrees that OPW by itself is a good thing?
Tristan, thanks a lot for your post. I am deeply ashamed how the GNOME community is treating Philip. Talking noble words about outreach and feminism, while at the same time being as discriminating towards anyone expressing critique is bigot at best, but most probably it’s some worse social dysfunction.
In my opinion GNOME had nothing to do with freedom or tolerance or anything like for the last four, five years. So if you care about that values: Stay away from that snake pit. Stay away yourself and keep your children away.
Emanuele Aina – Stop framing things as OPW supporters vs OPW detractors.
People who want the foundation to concentrate more on the software are not automatically against OPW or against encouraging more women to get involved with contributions to oss or to become more involved in stem subjects in general.
On the foundation list you can find long threads on this very subject where people were asking for gnome to be a contributor to OPW but not responsible for managing its accounts. The FSF offered to help. The discussion died like all other discussions involving any form of change.
This is a case of a few people being manipulative, whether its responding to mailing list threads on the foundation list asking whether it is possible for more transparency with accusations of offence due to “implied” wrong doing or simply ignoring questions raised by members in long threads or dismissing them wholeheartedly.
There is an apposition to any form of change in the foundation by a few people and they have been getting their way for a long time now.
And yes the fact that there are only two sponsorship programs the foundation has been interested in,
a) for students or
b) for a particular gender is frustrating and if you followed the responses at the time gsoc was brought up as well.
There used to be annual reports on contributions and where they were coming from before the foundation changed its stance. You could see what distributions were contributing, what contributions where independent. All that is gone now and if it were brought back I guarantee it would look very different today.
Having the foundation concentrate more on the software platform would have helped it’s reputation as an independent software project, It could have mediated instead of letting the project spiral to the point where it is now, it would have helped it remain somewhat independent and self sufficient if google were to stop gsoc tomorrow.
Constantly telling people who disagree that they are against OPW or against women is bloody frustrating and dishonest.
Ebassi is well aware of this and has pointed out on irc that he doesn’t care. His attitude there is completely different than this self righteous crap he posts on planet gnome.
Tristan,
I was able to find the post archived in another organization’s planet archive.
so I do not dispute your paste of the contents.
Though honestly, since philip went out of his way to tag the post as both extremely controversial and extremely condescending, i think he was trolling the entire community a bit..even you as his defender.
I think perhaps philip was looking to push some buttons for an already hot button topic. Pouring gasoline on the embers of a smoldering fire.. that got lit over a month earlier and had already basically burned out in other venues.
Outside of the now resurrected blog post from late May. I’m having a hard time finding any on the record discussion from philip concerning the state of OPW management at all in 2013/2014. The foundation list had a nice long discussion in this in April 2014 that lingered into May a bit… and he wasn’t participating in that at all. Which is weird as philip has been an active participant in foundation discussion off and on for years now.. as far back as I dare look. And even lwn picked up the story as well in April…and as far as I can tell.. he didn’t participate in the discussion there in April either I don’t think. But I don’t have a perfect one-to-one mapping of LWN accounts to people so I might have missed him there.
So really the post is sort of totally out of the blue over a month after the long controversial discussion about OPW mangement already went down in the scope of the foundation list. Its the sort of post you fire off to delibrately troll people who are most likely already emotionally frayed and on a hair trigger on the topic.
Now it is certainly possible that he was entirely unaware of the long discussion in April that happened across multiple venues about OPW and he stepped on a landmine with his admitted extremely condescending post. But if your going to make condescending comments without being situationally aware, you have to expect blowback and you have to be ready and willing to apologize. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve done that sort of thing, made a snarky comment to vent to a group of people, without being situationally aware and got an earful for being a douchebag. And rightly so.
This sort of stresses the same criticism that Ruiz made, that philip has been out of the loop at the foundation level interactions it seems…after being an active participant in discussion in years prior. You sort of expect him to know better than throw out a troll like that in a blog post, instead of participating in the discussion that was on going.
Maybe the fundamental mistake here was philip was tagging and writing posts in an “extremely condescending” mindset and people took that tagging at face value. Kind of hard to continue to give someone the benefit of the doubt with regard to best intent when they tell up right up front they are being extremely condescending. If your writing condescending posts and tagging them as condescending posts then there’s very little assumption left about intention. Right?
Personally I think everyone who reacted strongly got trolled by philip. Just a weebit. And philip perhaps wasn’t as aware of how touchy the OPW issue actually was in late may..considering the looooooooooooooooooong discussion in April and May over management of the program. Very easy for a normal human being,to take a self identified “condescending” post from philip as not so friendly fire.
I think the blog post reactions from Meg Ford and Nirbheek Chauhan did an excellent job of using philip’s condescending post as an opportunity to talk up the value of OPW while avoiding being trolled. Meg gets high marks in particular from me for strategic messaging when dealing with philip. Both this may, and in previous foundation list interactions i’ve reviewed. I sort of actually fear the day I have to take her on across a rhetorical divide She will utterly destroy my every attempt to manipulate discussion, to derail her argument and will stay rock solidly on message.
@Emanuele: Okay you clearly didnt get it. I was making reference to this: “finally, I ask you (like I asked Philip multiple times) to use my name, not another one. my name is on Planet GNOME, on my blog, my emails, and my commits on Git; it ought to be just common courtesy to at least get it right, if you’re trying to do a character assassination.”
I was being an ass because he was being an ass with this whole “I will fight you and I will win”.
Fair, right?
@Mike Barker, I got the reference, still not sarcasm and not fair at all.
Being an ass because someone else is being an ass isn’t a very mature proposition, and for sure we wouldn’t have this conversation if I applied the same misdirected reasoning. I’m still waiting for the apologies to Emmanuele.
@John mchugh, so I guess your answer to my question about OPW being a good thing is yes. \o/
Your only concern seems to be which organization should be responsible for it: you think it would be better if hosted by the FSF rather than GNOME.
Truth to be told, I may even agree with that even if I don’t know the details and honestly I don’t care much.
But the point here is that Philip was saying that OPW detracts resources from GNOME development, and I don’t see how moving the organization to the FSF would change this if the Foundation would hand to the FSF the same amount of money.
And to be more clear, it’s not my intention to frame the discussion in a pro-OPW vs. anti-OPW debate: I don’t want to waste any time with anyone who declares himself anti-OPW because as you suggest it’s a very silly position as OPW is a objectively positive thing.
My point is about priorities: my understanding is that Tristan (and I guess you) thinks that OPW has a lower priority and funds should be spent on outreach only after we employed that money to get better developer tools. Please correct me if I’m mischaracterizing your position.
I’m contending this point because it implicitly assumes that people involved in OPW cannot help us get better developer tools. If they didn’t yet is because there haven’t been enough mentors on this topic, so the answer should be *more* OPW rather than less.
@tvb, you wrote: “Personally, I still suspect to this day that module proposal period was removed so that gnome-shell could be added to the release (…)”, there’s nothing to suspect here, gnome-shell had an initial “semi proposal” to have it as preview in 2.30, then a real proposal for 3.0 (later that year it even got reevaluated and 3.0 was postponed for six months). Here are the archived mails:
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2009-November/msg00006.html
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2010-March/msg00208.html
@tvb, I don’t see any lack of tollerance. Philip has requested to be removed from PGO, yelled “you suck” at every GNOME developer and has been generally abusive in private conversations. You’re still on PGO, the debate may be a bit heated but still on the polite side, and I guess defending someone who just insulted you is likely to trigger some hard feedback, isn’t it?
You say that OPW receives a preferential treatment when compared to other GNOME project: the truth is that OPW has been a hugely successful project while other didn’t receive so much attention from the general public and from other projects. That’s why the Foundation is spending so many resources on it.
I’m still unconvinced that adjusting one’s own idea in response to how badly it gets perceived is a flawed logic. On the contrary, I still think that it takes a great deal of deep introspection abilities to adjust when things don’t work as well as expected.
To be clear, I’m not expecting you to get pro-OPW all of sudden, but defending Philip “unpolite” behaviour can easily lead someone to assume that “unpolite” comments are fine.
What annoys most people about these kind of posts is the suggestion that OPW isn’t about finding people who can ‘make great software’, or that OPW is somehow stopping Gnome making great software.
There is always a underling misogynistic tone to this kind of ‘conversation’ even if the person realises it or not. That being, that the contributions made by people hired through OPW are somehow sub par or would have been better had the program just not existed and we found the ‘best person for the job’. Even though there has never been any evidence to suggest otherwise.
All OPW does is allow Gnome to diversify the community while still ‘making great software’.
—————————————————————————
As for the claim of censorship. No one was censored. Just because people on Gnome Planet asked for the post to be taken down because they felt it was offensive does not mean anyone was censored.
The person is free to keep the post on their own blog. Freedom of speech does not mean everyone is forced to read what they say.
—————————————————————————
Also to be fair, if you want to say people should in engage this individual rather then dismiss them, then what is there to engage, what’s the conversation point? “Can we please now go back at making software?”. That’s exactly what OPW is about.
This is why people said their comment was misogynistic, because all that comment is saying is that I don’t think OPW is getting us the best contributors for the job. Where’s the discussion in that, where’s the evidence? How can someone see that as anything other then misogyny wrapped up as concern trolling?
This really isn’t about OPW or GSOC, they are doing what they do and doing it well. Its about the gnome foundation doing sweet fuck all and relying 100 percent on those two things.
Of course everyone who agrees with trying to have outreach to more people are labeled misogynistic by white men who are employed full time to work on open source software and have been employed full time to work on open source software for a long time.
Their privilege means that if you happen to be male, interested in open source software and require food to not starve you need to shut up and wither away or find a community which isn’t so up its own ass.
Oh and go look at the outreach of lack thereof with gtk. There is a lack of outreach to gsoc students and opw participants never mind outreach in general. When I brought up the fact that there had been a bountysource page set up on irc there was an overall dismissive attitude in the channel. What type of social experiment is this again. A joke more like.
@Emanuele Aina:
You obviously haven’t been following very closely or your vision is possibly distorted, which is understandable if you take the debate about the relevance of OPW very personally.
I am not defending Philip’s inpolite behaviour, and if you consider this phrase:
“I think with GNOME’s focus on this and a bit less on woman outreach programs; this year we could make a difference.”
To be inpolite or offensive in any way, then this would be a good indicator of exactly how emotionally involved people are and how that is clouding their judgement.
When certain people’s reaction to a statement like that is to cry out that Philip should be removed from Planet GNOME, and to publicly frown on him for having expressed his opinion, then, this is an indicator that something is terribly wrong. People are obviously so emotionally involved in this that it is impeding their capacity for critical thinking.
Also Emanuele Aina, you are making assumptions about my position on OPW, which is actually an opinion I find to be irrelevant to the subject material here, and an opinion I did not really care to share.
But I digress and will bite the flame bait.
I don’t know if everyone has noticed the elephant in the room, but let me point out that things are not going well for GNOME to begin with.
Since 2010 and the release of GNOME 3 we have been in dangerous waters and the storm is not over yet, we have really serious problems to address that concern the very sustainability of the project in the long term.
o Nokia’s mobile devision was aqcuired by Microsoft, this was a catalyst because it meant that many consulting firms, firms that basically exist because of GNOME, lost a lot of work, people lost their jobs.
o Canonical basically decided they were going to do their own thing, and went ahead with Unity.
o The timing of GNOME 3 was unfortunate, because at the moment we broke API in GTK+ we were basically lacking involvement from various users of the GNOME stack. This lack in diversity in the userbase of the GNOME stack, at a time when things were inherently unstable, did not help to inspire confidence in our platform.
o Worse still, is that since our platform did not receive significant testing by users of our stack, we are ending up with a platform that is only relevant for the single GNOME Desktop/gnome-shell use case.
o To make matters worse, we did not even do particularly well with GNOME 3, less and less linux distributions are now shipping GNOME as their default desktop.
o A result of all of this is that we’ve lost significant ground to the alternatives such as Qt and EFL, which are doing quite well now.
I think it’s glaringly obvious that our primary focus needs to be in diversifying our user base, making our platform safe to use and fostering growth in the micro economy which surrounds and sustains GNOME. The industry needs to have confidence in our ability to offer a stable and reliable platform if we are to remain relevent at all.
Now you may be thinking that hey, this is just a simple disagreement, Tristan thinks relevence of the platform is more important and I think that outreach is more important, sure… but before you go there please examine the facts.
The most crucial thing that sustains this community is both volunteer developer hours invested and paid developpers. Right now it’s very hard to get any paid developpers, mostly we see that Red Hat is footing the bill because they have vested interests in GNOME, we are very lucky to continue receiving contributions from Red Hat. But that is not enough to presume that we will survive.
The way things are going, it’s becomming difficult to have any meaningful elections for the Foundation Board, because of course we cannot allow more than 2 members to have the same affiliation. This is rightfully so because we need to protect the interests of GNOME as something different than the interests of just Red Hat.
If we do not take some decisive action to address the lack of diversity in the userbase of our platform soon, then there will be no GNOME anymore to offer travel subsidies and sponsor the events and all of those goodies that everyone loves so much. There may however be a Red Hat outreach program left over in the rouble.
Now that I’ve pointed out the elephant in the room, let me point out that none of the above mentioned dire situation we are in detracts from the value of OPW.
However one has to stop and question our priorities, if it was true that OPW was like GIMP, libchamplain, Pitivi or any other project under the GNOME umbrella, then it would not be eating into the precious voluntarily donated hours of our leadership. However this is patently untrue of OPW, as was discussed at length on foundation-list, the management of this project has overgrown the capacity of it’s organizers and it is falling to our leadership to deal with this.
If we elect a board of directors and hire an executive director, certainly we expect that they are looking after the best interests of GNOME, first and foremost the viability of the project in the long term has to be a priority.
So yes, my position on that matter, if it must be known, is that sure, outreach is a noble cause, nobody has said that it is not, if you read carefully, not even Philip is saying that.
I do think however that while I’m laying face down in the alley and slowly bleeding out, my priority should be to help myself, and if that means that I will live another day to fight for womens rights and to do great things like outreach, then I think that you should think carefully as well about our priorities, as our priorities might very well be aligned here while you may be failing to recognize it.
I can’t believe what a soap opera this has all become. It’s cringeworthy.
@Frederic Peters: I have to admit that out of all of my comments, the one you are replying to was the one that was written hastily and in anger.
It was an accident to bring that into the discussion as I’m not thoroughly prepared for a debate on that, interestingly however you will note that the most recent proposal you referred to has two replies, both well founded concerns, they did not ever receive a reply.
Will GNOME Shell be following the release cycle for a while so that we can make a better judgement call on this before blessing the module ? Will a11y be a blocker for GNOME Shell’s inclusion in the modulesets ? Will the GNOME Shells theming be compatible with the desktop settings we use today, so as to ease transition ?
Was any consensus ever reached ? Is there a public record of that ?
I wonder what private conversations Emanuele means when she says “and has been generally abusive in private conversations”: I never discussed anything in private with her. I don’t even know her.
I conclude her attempts are nothing but a complete fabrication (or a character assassination if you prefer that wording) by making ‘claims’ about what I “generally” say in private conversations (what she knows nothing of). It’s probably about what Zeeshan published in a Google+ post? What he writes there is what he writes. Not necessarily what I wrote. I didn’t even read it as I’m not a user of Google+.
It’s actually funny to see Zeeshan document it here publicly how the fabricating and character assassination by people like himself works. It’s equally funny to see others (like Emmanuele) expose their style and methods too. Even in the shadow of the blog post publicly exposing it, they continue with it nonetheless. Heartbreaking that this is what has become of some of GNOME’s people.
My private conversations on the IRC server GimpNET were and have over the years been limited to conversations with Jürg Billeter, Adrien Bustany, Martyn Russel, Mathias Hasselmann, Carlos Garnacho, Alexander Morgado, Ivan Frade, etc. Why don’t people ask those guys who I am, how I operate, how professional I can be and how I am in private? They worked together with me for years. I’m sure they won’t, like what Zeeshan utterly unprofessionally does, share out of context conversations with you.
Fabricating and speculating what I say in private conversions is, however, if you think about it, bad taste and very unprofessional.
At least here in Belgium it’s not legal to publish blatant lies about an individual and perform character assassinations time after time, year after year. This is what a central group within current GNOME does and did many times since several years. As everybody can see it continues in comments on this blog post.
That you knew the nature of the conversation was private, Zeeshan, is illustrated by yourself when you said that you cannot share it here because of its private nature. Google+ is NOT private, you know. You clearly didn’t have my permission nor did I read what you carelessly published nor will I comment on its accuracy. Knowing how you do things, you probably took things in a distasteful taste out of context and added stuff. We both know how you operated in the past, don’t we?
I also wonder why I’m always receiving so much attention? Apparently I’m a huge risk for the reign of the current priests at GNOME? There is no room for any opposition to you guys, right? Emmanuele will fight you, and he will win. Correct?
Is having to fight with people over any such disagreement written somewhere in the Vade mecum of geekfeminism too?
I’m guessing Emmanuele, with his Stalinist ‘I will fight you and I will win’, right now thinks he’s on some special GNOME Throne dictating his will onto his subjects? I’m afraid Emmanuele has lost touch with reality. I can only hope for GNOME that he gets replaced before he does even more damage to the project.
I’m sorry to bring it to Emmanuele that the thing he is sitting on isn’t a throne at all: it’s the result of years of hard work by very technical people building modules and tools that form the GNOME platform. Pieces of it are being reused all over the industry, not just in the GNOME3 desktop. These technical people definitely didn’t create the mountain of useful components for you to put a false throne atop of it.
Extremely good technical people used to flock to GNOME. Right now, almost all those people are running away. Most of them in silence. I actually received support from a some of them last few days. It surprised me too.
Last time I recall that I proposed a vote (to split GNOME from GNU). The results also where clearly not in favor of what priest Richard Stallman was proposing (making commercial references on P.G.O illegal in the charter of GNOME). The vote’s questions, which somebody else executed and created, were ambiguous in whether a split must actually happen.
I was to be honest not in favor of actually casting the vote. It happened nonetheless (truly out of my power).
But no matter how one interpreted it, the democratic (that included the bazar) results where not in favor of Richard Stallman’s proposal. What happened after the vote was that a religious-like believe system got installed and technical people (the bazar) started leaving. After that geekfeminism arrived and added another layer of extremism to GNOME. By now GNOME is solely a cathedral.
Ever since that time Zeeshan has always been furiously mad at me for some strange reason. Apparently it was not ok for him to question priest Richard Stallman. The private conversion I did start this week with Zeeshan was the simple question whether or not he’s still mad at me after so many years. He still was, now illustrated to all by that he starts mudslinging at me again. Not the first time. Looks like not going to be the last time either.
My apologizes to the technical people within GNOME who felt offended by ‘you guys suck’. The line was an expression of my deep frustration with GNOME’s last three or four years. These years have killed or scared away all meaningful innovation within GNOME. It is right now making GNOME, the brand, the project, irrelevant.
Some people wonder why I didn’t discuss my grievances on the foundation-list. They should consider that I’m heavily censored if not already outright banned from that mailing list. I gave up on that mailing list years ago. I also can’t discuss my grievances IN the big cathedral that GNOME has become, if the grievances ARE about the fact that GNOME has turned into a cathedral. At the throne that got installed there, the highest-in-command priest in front will only yell at me muttering words like ‘I will fight you, and I will win’. I can only discuss this outside of the cathedral.
What Mathias Hasselmann said is correct: If you care about freedom or tolerance; stay away from snake pit that GNOME has become. Stay away yourself and keep your children away. Mathias is a much respected member of the larger opensource community and did extremely well known good work that YOU are probably using right now.
There is however no more active bazar around the GNOME cathedral. So with my request for removal from P.G.O. I asked to be removed from the entire GNOME-city as the mudslinging of Zeeshan and others is now reaching my professional career. I operate in a larger context than just GNOME and I prefer to distantiate myself from it hoping that this removes certain people’s ability to use the affiliation against me. Right now they don’t and can’t know me, I have no business or dealings with them. So bye bye to them.
Others active in the bazar have also fled to other opensource-cities and this is a huge reason why so little is going on at GNOME at the moment.
So long and thanks for all the fish. Good luck to whoever sticks around.
Wow, people are really conflating lots of things here, please forgive me if I lost some nuances but we range from accusation of Philip being harassed, questioning OPW usefulness, questioning the Foundation role in OPW, questioning the financial sustainability of OPW, accusation to white males employed to work on open source to not care about other white males starving, bad bad GTK+ developers and their dismissive attitude on IRC, the usual, abysmal failure which is GNOME 3, some not particularly relevant business advice, the false dichotomy that OPW steals resources to GIMP, libchamplain and whatnot, and some gloomy predictions of doom for the whole project.
I’ll just point out that GNOME 3 has been awesome for me since it entered Debian experimental, that I have an hard time believing that Nokia switching away from GTK+ had anything to do with GNOME 3 and that I’ll end the discussion here because there’s no point debating anything when the focus keep being moved around.
Cheers!
Concerning OPW itself: I’m technically not against outreach programs. I’m philosophically against any form of discrimination, that much is true. This includes that I’m also against positive discrimination. I see OPW as positive discrimination and a valid reason for doing it has nobody ever given me. That includes the Matthew Garrets and the geekfeminism stuff. I’m quite deep into philosophers like, among others, Spinoza lately. But maybe I’m still too stupid to understand the true philosophic necessity to positively discriminate +50% of a population?
From other’s reactions and E-mails on projects’ mailing lists I rather conclude that the pendulum swung right to the other side and that now several young male hackers feel discriminated due to OPW. That’s something that ought to be addressed!
I’d propose to continue OPW outside of the GNOME project. Let that organization contribute to GNOME and let people donate to it itself?
GNOME is about building something technical. People think that it’s a social experiment, but it really is not. The FSF is that social experiment already.
GNOME was always a technical thing (until four years ago or something).
Perhaps trying to change it into something different is what is going wrong?
@Emanuele Aina:
I’m not sure what you are refering to as “not particularly relevant business advice”.
Perhaps you have not been around enough years to understand that GNOME relies on the participation of the industry, and Red Hat is an example of this, however it seems to be one of the only remaining examples of our supporters.
Our software is less and less relevant to other supporters and does not inspire much confidence, the trust we built over 10 years of stability can easily be shattered by only a couple of years of complacency.
What do you think would happen if Red Hat were to pull their support from GNOME ?
The diversity of our supporters is the single most important thing that needs to be addressed, or everything we’ve done in the last 15 years will go to waste, and really, there won’t be much of a foundation left to support programs like OPW.
If you don’t see the relevence of that, then I have to assume that you don’t really have much practical sense.
https://twitter.com/ebassi – Understand Emmanuel runs gnome haters twitter account. Shows the maturity level this project has lowered itself to.
Comes here shoveling crap about how gnome is an amazing social project and then goes to twitter to insult everyone and paint us all as bigots because one person insulted his name.
@tvb There is rarely any consensus reached on the foundation list. Ebassi et all speak their mind and irregardless of anyone else’s opinion or how much appose their views the conversation is shut down and nothing changes.
He talks about how wonderful this project is on the planet and on irc, bug reports and everywhere else he tells people to piss off. He even attacks the owner of worldofgnome because one post out of hundreds was slightly critical.
Does ebassi actually mentor any students for gsoc or opw? He is the maintainer of gtk right? A fairly large module in gnome. Other than vilifying people what the hell is he doing in a practical sense for his own damned project to increase participation of the opposite sex. Nothing.
All he is doing is spreading misinformation about peoples intentions and character. Assuming everyone who disagree’s with him are against women being involved and being treated like peers and not objects. Assuming we haven’t noticed and fight against the social barriers facing women from an early age. Guess what, we have gf, sisters, nieces, daughters and mothers and don’t put up with that shit directed towards them and wont put up with shit you direct towards us either.
Having the gnome foundation handle the accounts for OPW doesn’t distract from gtk’s lack of involvement. He is a giant immature hypocrite as far as I am concerned and can’t stress enough how he doesn’t care about outreach or women.
He just wants to look like a hero to tickle his own ego.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to get students and women involved with that module instead of assassinating peoples character for having a different opinion on how the gnome foundation(not OPW or GSOC) programs should be run.
Clearly not , the entire project belongs to ebassi et all now and they are free to run it into the ground.
@KeNaCo
“When I read post from Philip Van Hoof first I think was “At least! Somebody say it!””
That is.
It is deeply ashaming to see this turn into a witch hunt.
“I will fight you and win” …. wtf?
“At least! Somebody say it!”
This harassements, that witch hunt, is such sick. A very sane question, as was asked by Philip, triggers a ‘Beissreflex’ that leads to a “fight that I will win”. Why do so many people fail to realize that something went very wrong here.
What about the other very valid point which was silently turned down?
“You invested in …, oh right, you only invested in woman outreach programs.”
My own quesrion on top: There is good money coming in with GSOC. Why is that money not used for GSOC but OPW?
@Philip
“GNOME is about building something technical. People think that it’s a social experiment, but it really is not. The FSF is that social experiment already.”
I think that’s the mistake we’re all making here. GNOME is not just a technical thing nor just a social one.
Separating things like that will only lead to failure. look at FSF which has (sort of) separated the technical side from itself. it hasn’t done anything useful…not a single one…oh wait, it has probably wasted money…yeah it has done that one…and that’s not because of it’s people, we can’t say they all suck!
bazaar and cathedral can’t live without each other. and giving them to completely separate hands will destroy them both.
priests will talk till they run out of food and starve and engineers will build a straght road to the middle of hell… they need each other….
—
seperating things in that way, is just wrong…