[forum] A Call For Open Governance Of X Development

[Havoc Pennington]

On Sat, Mar 22, 2003 at 11:53:57AM +1100, Daniel Stone wrote: 
> > The Gnome Foundation is the only organization that comes to mind that
> > has a turely elected board. 
> 
> Which is mainly filled with corporations, a la the KDE League. The
> League mainly does our PR and corporate-friendly work, and again, is
> entirely independent from KDE developers, and development issues.

GNOME foundation is a bit different, it is explicitly the leadership
of the GNOME project.

Keep in mind, an important aspect of the GNOME Foundation is that it
is not a consortium. There is no way for a company to join in any
decision-making role, the only way to be a foundation member is to be
an active GNOME contributor. All members join as individuals. The
board of directors has a hard limit on number of directors that can be
from one company.

For details, check out the charter and bylaws at
http://foundation.gnome.org/, and you can read a list of exactly who
voted and who they voted for in each board election at
http://foundation.gnome.org/elections/2002/verify.html (here you can
see for example that of the 275 voters this year grep says 33 were
@sun.com, 23 @ximian.com, and 5 @redhat.com - which maps about right
to how many contributors there are from each of those companies).

See the mission statement section in the charter for a short summary
of exactly what the GNOME Foundation does:
http://foundation.gnome.org/charter.html

Apache seems to have a somewhat comparable model to GNOME, from
http://www.apache.org/foundation/roles.html:

    The Apache Software Foundation Board of Directors is responsible
    for management and oversight of the business and affairs of the
    corporation. While the Board retains ultimate responsibility for
    the foundation, it delegates decision-making authority for the
    technical direction of projects to the Project Management
    Committees.

Anyway, "there's more than one way to do it"

Havoc