So, I have not been blogging. I have not been incredibly productive either. It's kinda funny to read about our Boston friends being cold, because here in Sydney, it's too fucking hot to think. It was 32°C yesterday, with facial-hair-toasting breezes through the canyons of the inner city. The heat has not contributed positively to my motivation or productivity.
As I woke up to a refreshingly cool morning for a Foundation Board meeting today (07:30 is so much saner than the 02:00 and 04:00 ones), I read a mail from Luis that obliquely mentioned something happening on foundation-list. Lots of people worried that the the latest development release name might be taken offensively. Despite the beginning of the discussion, the on-list mail was fairly tame and reasonable. But here's what happens off-list:
If you really have this little sense, I hope people remember it at next year's foundation elections. IMO, you owe the community an apology. Not lame defenses of a defenseless act. Clever is fine. Crude is just crude.
I too hope that people remember this at next year's foundation elections. I also hope that I have the presence of mind to remind everyone of it in my election statement. Why on Earth would I do that? Well, if everything I do for GNOME, every contribution I make, every minute I spend thinking about my GNOME todo list, every shadow of guilt that passes over me as I do something instead of working on GNOME stuff, every joule of energy I pump into the project or drain from my sleep... If everything I do can be accountable to something such as this... I wouldn't want to be elected. I wouldn't want to be involved.
It's lucky, despite the lack of love apparent at the moment, that the GNOME community is not quite as dense as the poster might suggest. Even so, did you know that during the pre-2.0 release process, I was flamed for being "disrespectful" to Astrid Lundgren through our Pippy Longstocking inspired Swedish release names? Never mind that they came about as an admittedly left-field in memoriam... Sure kept the trolls busy while we madly fixed up GNOME for 2.0 though. Ah, the good old days when obscure release names were cunning marketing strategies. ;-) Just after the first Developer Platform preview, we really wanted to say something horrible about Andrew Orlowski in one of our release names (but decided not to, because it might be inappropriate). Luckily, the Pan dudes did it for us. I can't imagine what the flamewar would have been like if we released the first snapshot as "Andrew Orlowski: Your Mum".
So in the meantime, I have suggested what I think is a reasonable long-term solution to avoid issues like this. We can happily route around the damage and get on with the task at hand: World domination. Hmm, but I get flamed for saying that too. #