Law Students

LWN interview on Stormy and other subjects

By Luis

This weekend Linux Weekly News interviewed me on a variety of topics, but primarily on Stormy and GNOME’s finances. It has now been posted. It is behind the LWN paywall for now, but will be available more generally in the future. (I urge everyone to subscribe to LWN; it is an excellent publication.)

In the meantime, perhaps the best summary of the important part can be extracted from the comments, lightly edited for coherency (commenter in bold/italic, me in blockquote):

Why don’t you take a look at how KDE e.V. is run? AFAIK, they don’t pay in 6 figures to anyone and still manage to get the job done in terms of sponsorships and are not looking for a bailout.

We’ve been operating in a manner similar to KDE e.V. since our last Executive Director left, so we’re familiar with the part-time administrative assistant model of doing things. Some things work fairly well when you’re organized that way; others do not.

Goes to show the mindset of the upper echelons of the GNOME project.

I agree completely. It shows that our mindset is that we were unwilling to sit still and tread water. Our mindset was that we wanted to move aggressively forward and change how GNOME related to the outside world. I hope I was clear in the interview of all the various ways in which Stormy helps us do that.

Now, you can certainly question and say bad things about the timing and judgment of those steps. We did expect this to be financially challenging, but we misjudged how badly it would challenge us.

But I think if you want to question the mindset either I didn’t explain our proactive mindset very well in the interview (possible) or you have a very limited vision of what something like the Foundation can do for our community. Certainly I’m very proud of standing for that active, aggressive view of what the Foundation can achieve, and I think most GNOME Foundation members agree with that (though I completely understand if they are chagrined at the financial situation.)

Full post as published by Luis Villa's Home Page on May 12, 2009 (boomark / email).