GNOME board member denies Icaza post caused furore

Sam Varghese
Friday, 18 December 2009 03:01

Opinion and Analysis

A member of the GNOME Foundation board has denied that a post by GNOME co-founder Miguel de Icaza led to a discussion on the Foundation mailing list which resulted in a call for the project to cut its ties with the GNU Project.


Behdad Esfahbod made reference to a story in these columns, wherein it was claimed that a Planet GNOME post by De Icaza, about Microsoft's Silverlight technology, served as the catalyst for another Foundation member, Lucas Rocha, to start a discussion on members' complaints about the type of content appearing on the Planet.

The discussion begun by Rocha led to one senior developer, Philip Van Hoof, calling for a vote on whether GNOME should continue to be part of the GNU Project. He was supported by GNOME advisory board member, David Schlesinger. The iTWire report did not attribute Van Hoof's call to the Foundation, but only to him.

The Planet is a site that accumulates content from the blogs of GNOME contributors and some others. In the past there have been complaints over its handling by former GNOME media spokesman, Jeff Waugh.

Esfahbod, who appears to favour a limited form of censorship of the Foundation mailing list archives, said, in part: "For example the ITWire (sic) article suggests that a blog post by Miguel was the trigger for Lucas starting the thread in f-l. I can assure you (as a board member) that this is not the case."

He did not provide any indication as to what content on Planet GNOME had provoked Rocha to start the discussion about complaints received from community members about some of the content on the Planet.

In response to another member saying that transparency was one of GNOME's greatest assets, Esfahbod added: "Transparency doesn't necessarily mean open to the world. Being open to all our members is transparent-enough (sic) for me."

And in his post calling for the mailing list archives to be made private, Esfahbod wrote: "I like to ask for your support in my petition for referendum to make foundation-list archives private and membership limited to actual Foundation members. If we make that change we would be able to discuss matters freely without making lots of news that more often than not are harmful to our image to the world in general."

Following the iTWire story on the weekend, Esfahbod launched a petition, asking for the Foundation's mailing list archives private and limited to its members only.

Support for his petition has been lukewarm, with 14 Foundation members signing up, one of whom has indicated that he is not in favour of the mailing list archives being made private. One non-member has added his name as well.

De Icaza is now a vice-president at Novell and leads the projects which are developing Mono and Moonlight, open source clones of Microsoft's .NET and Silverlight respectively.