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Friday September 30, 2005

KDE eV Minutes musings

Software

As a unique KDE e.V. member (the only passive member as far as I'm aware), I'd like to give my response to the 2005 membership meeting notes. I forgot whether I got an official invitation to Malaga or not. Either way, I didn't go (nor intend to due to a busy schedule) so this is pretty much my first encounter with the contents of the meeting.

Warning: despite my continued affection for KDE, I'm probably know as whisteblower or even enemy regarding various organisational aspects of the community. My journal posts on KDE tend to be critical and not a party, as I've learned from previous meetings that software developers do not tend to party well.

Zack says there's two people here who would like to become members, Ben Meyer and Marius Bugge Monsen (both Trolltech employees). Question if they are just Qt developers and not KDE developers. Some discussion on whether Marios has contributed enough to KDE or just to Qt. The membership votes on their membership and they are accepted.

I can't respond to this decision, but I'm glad to see some awareness that Qt and KDE are not the same. I will continue to advocate that this distinction should be more distinct on sites such as KDE Apps and within the community as well. Merely using Qt does not constitute KDE desktop integration and often even hurts it, so KDE should not embrace Qt-alone solutions merely for market share purposes.

Suggestion from the treasurer of paying an allowance of about 20 euro a day to people representing KDE, not to pay anyone for working but for covering expenses e.g. food. This is allowed by the charitable allowances. Konold gives a counter proposal for letting the board make up rules to be posted to the list. There will be an allocated leader for an event who will allocate who is on the team and is eligible for expenses. He notes that in the past people have sent in first class tickets which is why they now only pay 80% of expenses.

Hopefully the rules will consider this: it would be more cost-effective to find out the price of an economy class ticket and reimburse up to that amount. An eighty per cent discount on first class tickets is still a major loophole.

Supporting members proposal by Matthias Kalle Dalheimer. Two categories, individual members and corporate members. Individual members would pay 100euro per year and corporate 1000euro per year. They will get listed on a page on kde.org, a link to their website with logo, artists can create a KDE e.v. supporting logo for their website, written invitations to conferences, can attend assemblies without a vote, preferential treatment for rooms at conferences, mailing list kde-ev-allowance for event expenses. Corporate members get subscribed to kde-ev-supporters which regular members are subscribed on too and they can suggest improvements to KDE and they would get a designated contact within the KDE developers.

As passive member, I have to wonder how such a supporting membership would relate to my status, especially because new mailinglists are proposed for these members. In the past, a proposal of mine to have a non-confidential mailinglist for regular members was shut down. I don't mind confidentiality but I do not think every single word uttered on the primary communication forum of an organisation should automatically be subject to such strict rules. The inability to create such a non-confidential mailinglist for the e.V. membership is a primary reason for my membership being passive and as a result I get no more information on the organisation than Joe Public.

Would these new mailing lists be secret? They had played around with the idea of subscribing them to the kde-ev-membership list but that wouldn't be practical, the idea of these new ones is they probably couldn't remain secret. Proposal (with one corporate member level) is accepted by vote.

I will inform the board that these new membership types, associated rights and forums might open up the possibility to fix this for passive members as well. I am however still concerned by the apparent desirability of secrecy: surely there are confidential discussion but secrecy should never be the default policy of an open source project.

All in all I'm not too unhappy with the meeting notes as I have read them. I'm getting the impression that my usual concerns are at least (still) being raised by parts of the membership. Whether they will be properly addressed remains to be seen, of course, but perhaps it's time to be hopeful again.

Breaking news - I agree with Microsoft

Software

I'm no fan of Microsoft software and business practises, but I'm with them on this matter: the GPL is viral and possibly more restrictive or harmful than many EULA.

At present, companies that distribute GPL-licensed software must make the source code publicly available, including any modifications they've made. Though the rule covers many businesses that use GPL-licensed software for commercial ends, it doesn't cover Web companies that use such software to offer their services through the Web, as they're not actually distributing the software.

GPL 3, the next version of the free software license, a draft of which is expected to be released in early 2006, may close this loophole, GPL author and Free Software Foundation head Richard Stallman said in an interview with publisher O'Reilly Media.

It's been said before, but he's a bit of a nutter, that Stallman. I'm so glad my software (although still unmaintained) is increasingly using the BSD license, or at least comes with the "or any later version" clause removed, where I still use the GPL.

Santa Claus is coming to.. court?

Anglosphere

If you think Christmas cards in September are weird, think again:

The Danish air force has admitted causing the death of Rudolph the reindeer and has paid compensation to Father Christmas.

I'm not making this up, it's a genuine Beeb article: Air force payout cures Santa woes. Wtf?! The full article makes a bit more sense but even the serious situation, about "Olovi Nikkanoff, one of Denmark's professional Santa Clauses", is worth a giggle. I don't feel sorry for the red nose though, he's a bit of a chav.

Christmas song for chavs

Anglosphere

It's been one of those days where I've been bored.

rudolph the red nosed reindeer
had some very shiny bling
and if you ever saw him
you saw him eat a chicken wing

all of the other reindeer
used to laugh and call him chav
they never let poor rudolph
join the well-paid reindeer staff

then one bloody christmas eve
santa came to say
rudolph with your bling so bright
sod off or i will start a fight

then all the reindeer kicked him
as they shouted out with glee
rudolph the red-nosed reindeer
go back to sodding cant'bury

Maybe a version 2.0 needs to be made for Christmas, but I feel like I could make a whole album of these and actually make some money.

Next day: Wednesday October 5, 2005 Previous day: Thursday September 29, 2005

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