Nothing happened in October. On November 26, a bombshell was dropped by senior developer Murray Cumming, who, in a post about candidates for the Foundation board, squarely took aim at Waugh. And while some saw the post as overtly personal, Cumming had specific complaints against Waugh which he ventilated in detail. He saw the same attitude which Waugh brought to Planet GNOME being duplicated all over the project, "the release team, the web team, the Gnome mobile group, the marketing team, and his management of Planet GNOME."

"Jeff Waugh’s only aim is self-publicity and any responsibilities in GNOME are just a way to achieve that," he wrote.

Strangely, when Waugh responded to this post, using his own blog as the medium, he did not refute any of Cumming's specifics - in fact, he acknowledged that there was some truth in the accusations. He then tried to paint Cumming's entire post as a personal attack and solicit sympathy.

The issue of administration of GNOME Planet was raised on the mailing list two days later - November 28 - by Mena Quintero, who asked if there had been any progress on the drafting of guidelines. He also pointed out that Neary's suggestion about having a second person with full editorial control of the Planet was worth discussing. And he offered to be the co-maintainer.

Waugh did not respond until December 14 and, when he did, there was no mention of documenting the guidelines: "I've spoken to potential maintainership team members who already have direct experience with pgo maintenance, and have been working on sucking guidelines out of my head and into publishable form. What you're asking for is already on the way."

When Mena Quintero tried to push the issue, asking 'Who's on the "potential maintainership team' for PGO, so that we may inquire them (sic) about the progress?", Waugh got a bit ratty, writing: "Sorry, but I'm not going to get caught up in pointless crap like this. Some folks may think it's okay to treat me differently as a result of attempted character assassination, but you should know better Federico. I've already said - before your emails and after them - that I'm writing down the guidelines and will have a maintainership team in order to resolve the minor maintenance issues with Planet GNOME. The potential co-maintainers have already had experience doing so, and were asked months ago."

Later in the same thread, Mena Quintero wrote: "I just find it funny that this (the drafting of guidelines) has been going on since September. That's three months to write a few guidelines and give the OK to some co-maintainers. So either the list of guidelines is horribly long, or the co-maintainers are not doing their job. I'd like to know who they are, if you please, so that I can help :)."

Since then there has been no discussion about the administration of the Planet on this mailing list. After 15 months, there are no guidelines for the Planet. There is a list of do's and don'ts for the hackergotchis, period.

Until Dawes ventilated his grievances nine days ago, there has been silence both on the mailing list and on the Planet about what obviously is a festering sore.

The irony? If you ask anyone involved in an open source or free software project how it operates, they will insist that it operates as a meritocracy and that the cream rises to the top!

Tags See All Tags

FOSS  GNOME  Open Source  Sam Varghese 

Comments (15)

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written by butbutbut, April 29, 2008

so did this guy kill your cat or reject your sexual advance or something? you write about him all the time as if thsi is news. surely there are more interesting things happening in open-source than FIVE pages on this? maybe you should get some counseling! im serious.

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written by sp, April 29, 2008

Sam, this whole article is shamefully petty. This isn't news, this is an attack piece without any legitimate relevance. It hurts your credibility and makes me want to go elsewhere for open source news.

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written by Mark, April 29, 2008

I've never met Jeff Waugh, I've read a lot of his opinion's over the years though, some of which I agree with and other's I don't.

You don't like Jeff Sam? we get it. You don't like Gnome Sam, we get it, now why don't you get over it and behave like a grown up, perhaps there's still time to reclaim some credibility which at the moment you seem intent on throwing away.

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written by Linux FTW, April 30, 2008

What are all these negative comments? Sam is just a journalist, who is telling it as he sees it. Ive read the story, it looks very clear cut to me - plenty of other people's legitimate complaints, all linked too.

I've noticed that Jeff Waugh is quick to criticise Sam in other stories, but no word from Jeff this time. Where are you, Jeff? Do you have any response to the complaints, not from Sam, but Planet Gnome users?

The complaints seem to stretch back for a very long time. Jeff was even quoted saying he's had 'Board' pressure. I wonder if, as a result of this article, a tiny bit more pressure will now be applied to Jeff Waugh. All I see from Jeff Waugh is deafening silence - just like the people who complained at Planet Gnome experienced, it seems. Jeff, will you respond, will you just say this is another 'personal attack' to try and distract from your own incomprehensible lack of action, or will you continue keeping silent?

Linux FTW

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written by Gnome User, April 30, 2008

Jeff seems to be too busy. He needs to be replaced for the good of the rest of the community. It shouldn't be this hard to replace or give extra hands to someone for their obvious negligence. Replace him, he's making too many people unhappy.

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written by PatrickH, April 30, 2008

Does GNOME have policies for potentially dealing with people that are getting in the way of progress?

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written by AdmFubar, April 30, 2008

Obvious solution is to create a new GNOME community. What are ya waiting for??

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written by Jeff Waugh, April 30, 2008

@Linux FTW: Mostly because I'm comfortable defending others against Sam's idiocy, but feel somewhat conflicted defending myself (and thus, lending legitimacy to his ravings).

Sam has a problem with GNOME, and uses Miguel and myself (among others) as a handy way to grind his axe. Plus, I'm not surprised to see a five page hit piece from Sam a couple of days after I rejected his combative interview questions about an entirely different issue (related to my work). :-) I'm sure you'll see the results of that in the coming week. Yay.

With regards to the issue itself, there haven't been any real complaints for six months because maintenance has been humming along nicely. The "complaint" last week was from someone who had attempted to add a third party's feed to Planet GNOME. The third party wasn't a GNOME Foundation member, wasn't an SVN committer, usually blogged in French, and hadn't actually blogged about GNOME yet (they were planning to blog their thoughts about usability, and thought they should be on Planet GNOME so everyone could read them -- that's not what Planet GNOME is for).

There was an attempt to paint this as lack of maintenance, and that Foundation members weren't being added. This is simply not the case, and you can see the evidence for yourself in the SVN repository. Yes, there's a governance issue that needs to be solved, but opinions differ as to how it should be done, and I haven't had a lot of time to sort that out. I'm very comfy taking the heat for that, but it needn't be misconstrued as something else.

But then, it's not like this is unusual from Sam. :-)

One can only ask questions. One can't dictate answers. -- Sam Varghese
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/02/21/1045638481419.html

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written by sam_varghese, April 30, 2008

Jeff Waugh's provision of facts is rather selective. He has not mentioned that the interview (for the link he provided) was solicited by him. I never asked him for anything on my own.

Waugh saw this interview - http://www.theage.com.au/artic...66517.html - and then wrote to me at my personal email address (highly unprofessional behaviour considering he didn't know me at all - additionally there was an official email link to me at the bottom of the article for anyone who wished to respond) offering himself as an interview subject.

He identified himself as the GNOME release manager, a member of the GNOME Foundation Board and president of the Sydney Linux Users' Group, apart from claiming to be an IT consultant specialising in free software.

Let me quote part of what he wrote: "If you're looking for an interview subject sometime, or a response to this particular article, you're welcome to contact me."

After that Waugh, a man who knows nothing about journalism even though he wears the title of "media spokesman" for the GNOME project, started complaining that he had been shafted.

He has obviously never heard of the word chutzpah.

And he's on a weak wicket trying to tie his rejection of questions about another issue to this article - the questions were rejected on April 28 at 4.44 pm (AEST) and this piece was filed on April 29 (AEST). There are no timestamps on our articles but if there were, it would be easy to see that this was filed at around 3.30am on April 29 (AEST) - that's when I get back from my regular job.

If anyone thinks you can trawl through the entire mail archives of the GNOME foundation and then write 2000 words in that time, please be my guest.

But then Waugh won't provide the little details - because that would have shown his argument to be worthless.

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written by Ricky Sha, April 30, 2008

Waugh is a jerk. A complete a$$. I wrote a program for GNOME that is still included with every distribution. Back when I was active with it, I had interaction with him and every one was miserable. Rather than make his points as a normal, rational person would, he would lash out and make personal attacks to defend the gibberish he was spewing. His involvement in GNOME led to my leaving the GNOME world and returning to Windows on the desktop. I still use linux exclusively on the server, but I don't want to be a part of a 'community' that calls him a leader.

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written by Ricky Sha, April 30, 2008

This isn't a 'Jeff is too busy' problem. They guy plays favorites way too often and if you dare disagree with him, count yourself in the bad side column for life. He's got a god complex, is all too willing to abuse the power he's been given for negative things and he's a liar on a level you don't see from many.

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written by Jeff Waugh, April 30, 2008

Ah, Sam's usual answer! Person who disagrees with him doesn't understand journalism, is unprofessional, must not understand English, etc. Hilarity. :-)

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written by nomdeplume, April 30, 2008

What's the bet that most of the comments in this thread are astroturfs from Sam and Jeff? ;)

The fact is there's no one totally in the right here. Both Sam and Jeff have proven themselves to be recalcitrants. Jeff probably needs to be helped in or relieved of some of his GNOME duties. Sam has shown over many years (even while he was writing for Fairfax) that he holds an intense bias against GNOME, taking it out especially on Jeff and Miguel, but also occasionally on Ubuntu (being the leading GNOME-based distro).

My advice to both of you: grow up.

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written by Rodney Dawes, May 01, 2008

I like Jeff's reply to a claim of unprofessionalism. It clearly shows how professional he acts toward the community and public.

But getting back tot he point, which Jeff just refuses to do, he seems to just want to divert any blame and avoid the problems, leaving them to be. He points to SVN logs as evidence that people do get added to Planet. What he fails to mention is that not everyone who asks to get added to planet, and deserves to, does not get added. The person I added, had sent several e-mails to Jeff asking to be added, with no reply, and after 18 months of silence, I felt it was appropriate to add him myself. As other primarily French speaking developers who have their blogs on Planet, his blog is also primarily in French. However, like those other developers, he has a GNOME specific category, which is primarily English. Of course, in the past week I've seen several posts on Planet, which have nothing to do with GNOME (US Economics in the Democratic Primaries), are in Portuguese, or are from a person who does not have an SVN account. So clearly, there is a lack of applied policy on the site. Though, perhaps not, as Jeff seems to be the only one who knows what the policy is. I also changed the nobody.png hakergotchi image which currently fails to comply with both the GPL2 and CC-By-SA 2.5 licenses, to a GPL only image directly from gnome-icon-theme, and that change was also reverted.

Within the last 6 months that Jeff claims has been going smoothly, he's also updated the public site to an unstable version of the planet software, which caused several issues on the live site, in the process. Yeah, breaking a live site, and willfully failing to comply with license agreements for images used on the site, seems to be going quite smoothly to me too.

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written by GNOME-user, May 02, 2008

I think this article is pretty on the spot, not "petty" or due to an "ax-grinding" wish. This Waugh guy is a problem for the Gnome community of developers, and as such he's a problem for Gnome users: I sure don't like titles like "open sores in Gnome" but surely you can't sweep the dirt under the carpet and hope for the best either.

Jeff, please do the right thing: leave PGO maintenance to someone who is willing to actually do it, let devs get back to coding instead of wasting time with this kind of matters.

GU