OpenMandriva

[rolf]

We all are the Community!

Uncategorized

by Kate Lebedeff

We all are the Community!



Short story. Facts and statement.



OpenMandriva Association (OMA) was founded by community members to continue development of desktop Mandriva Linux, which Mandriva S.A. company could not develop anymore due to their business strategy change. All contributors (including cooker members) and interested parties were invited to join OMA – in this way the initial list of members was formed. And OMA continues to be open for new members both newbies and anyone from the old community who missed the previous announcement for any reason.



The members of the Association have elected the Council consisting of most active members to serve as the representative of all members for dealing with everyday operations. Then working groups have been formed – infrastructure, marketing & communication, finances, and others. But these all are needed to support the main thing – the development. And here some problems occurred with one of the OMA members – an old community contributor Per Øyvind who started to claim himself to be the only project leader who does not need any advices from his colleagues to make decisions. Per Øyvind has violated the agreements and decisions that OMA made using legitimate democratic procedures thus breaking the core principles of a community organization. Moreover, he tried to technically hijack the project and release a distribution under his name.



We at OMA have to take immediate actions in order to protect the organization from self-proclaimed leaders and hijackers and allow our members to work per the principles agreed when the Association was founded by the community.



For the reasons explained above we don’t see any possibility to keep Per Øyvind among the OMA members. He is excluded from the Association to allow other OMA members to work in safe and positive environment.



We are back to work. We have a release to attend to.

Thank you.

More details, for those interested (comments).

Association IS the community and takes decisions on it’s behalf, asking everybody to be involved and have his say. We look for consensus, for everybody to agree and try to avoid voting, looking for common decisions until the very last mile. The main principle – this has to be done together.

A single person cannot own the work of all, and can not make decisions on behalf of all, or claim that he is the only one to know the right way. Each member knows the best way:), though we united to have the group strengths, since this is open source.

Some details on important definitions, related to Association, can be found here, summarizing the meeting of developers and administration (council, which now happens to have half of it’s members – developers) :

http://openmandriva.org/2013/04/associa ... finitions/

Since everybody knows “the best way”, there are some basic ideas of operations, which were accepted, on how exactly everybody can get heard and common decisions could be taken. These “how-to” are not set in stone and get adapted, following your demands. Like recently there was a demand from Per Øyvind, to have more discussions about non-technical matters with developers, and to raise the release name issue again. These were attended in full, despite the manner in which the demands were presented and the fact, that these issues were not previously ignored. Regarding name issue.There were accusations, that OMA is forcing decisions in this regard (as if “OMA” is something separate from community, but it IS the community, let’s not follow provocations). It simply never happened. Community decides. Look at how logo was selected. Name will be selected right now in a similar way. One just needs to consider, that the association is very young and is building up. It is not yet time to judge, it is time to raise the concerns and improve, not to attack the 3 month entity with accusations of “this is not perfect” – yes it is not, it is simply not yet finished. One can not judge the draft, let it become full document first. And it depends on all of us, how quickly we could get to “very good” and then “perfect-perfect” stages:)



Last meetings (TC (Technical committee, currently all active developers) on 24th March and TC+council on April 10th) covered all hot open issues. After these meetings there were no concerns raised. Work is in progress.



If there are any open issues left – let’s discuss. Association is founded by you and for you, let it serve you. Speak out. And it will be up to the whole group to take common decision.



Speaking of conflict situation of past weeks, we can say that all issues, raised during the conflict, were attended. What cannot be accepted though is an attempt to speak on behalf of “project” now, after publicly held and accepted developers (TC) meetings, opposing it’s results (results including the definitions, what relates to “project” as well).

Given the methods, ie flame, which was used before, we now have to take preventive measures, to let people work in this environment, as it is meant to be, and not be dragged into endless discussions (the points from which were extracted and attended to). This means that Per Øyvind is in pre-moderation mode on all media, belonging to OpenMandriva Association.

We stress, that Per Øyvind and his views are respected, we are and will be open for cooperation, and would be glad to go forward with this, if Per Øyvind expresses such a wish and accepts, that developers group speaking is more than 1 developer having his opinion, and that group, involving all contributors for the project, also has the say. Open source is not about singles.



Community tried all possible ways to sort this situation out in peace. The last offer discussed was to have “Moondrake” project as separate one, a spin on association’s base. That could give Per Øyvind the project he trusts in, and let others take proper, common group decisions. Not to mention the shared code. This offer was rejected by Per Øyvind, as well as other compromises, which were offered.

The name “Moondrake” and the domain are owned by Mandriva SA. Association can have no guarantees on that, but was (and IS) offering Per Øyvind help in approaching Mandriva SA to ask for a friendly gesture, to grant the respective rights to Per Øyvind. Should he be interested, he is free to approach Association about this, we are open and willing to be cooperative.

We felt necessary to tell this openly. Sometimes nobody is bad or wrong, just views do not match. That’s fine to us.

[viking60]

The name “Moondrake” and the domain are owned by Mandriva SA.

I did not know that Moondrake was owned by Mandriva SA.
And it does not compute with:

Per Øyvind has violated the agreements and decisions that OMA made using legitimate democratic procedures thus breaking the core principles of a community organization. Moreover, he tried to technically hijack the project and release a distribution under his name.

Because it is not his name.


Regardig the part where OMA is the community, they seem to doubt this themselves - or else they would simply decide a temporary name after a "proper common group decision":

....so can we agree on having no-name now, not to go into that? The issue caused enough trouble already.
Reason is simple: if we were to decide now, how would we do that? Vote? By who?
Just decision of several people? Who?

Toss a coin or accept Moondrake - If the Council cannot even manage that - what do we need them for? I don't care. The final name can be dealt with "properly" but there seems to be no clear idea of what that is.
They offer to assist Per Øyvind in requesting the name for his own fork - But never even considered to approach Mandriva SA on behalf of the community to make Moondrake a candidate for the distro name at hand.

Will I be offered assistance in starting my own fork if I suggest a name they don't like? Will anyone disagreeing strongly enough get the same "generous" offer?
In principle it is only a matter of not accepting one person to take control over the distro but 10 will do just fine.

I am not sure what is best but I would prefer the alternative that can get the distro out there first. Normally it would be the larger group - but in this case I just don't know....
Whatever you think about Per Øvinds diplomatic skills he seems to be Pro-Active and the Association so far seems to be Re-Active.
(I have no problem to believe that provind proclaimed himself leader - that shoe does fit. He always does that in a less modest way. I also have no problem in believing that he has P.. people off - he has a natural talent for that too...like rolf).

Who is the leader?

This part does bother me a bit:

(as if “OMA” is something separate from community, but it IS the community, let’s not follow provocations). It simply never happened. Community decides. Look at how logo was selected. Name will be selected right now in a similar way

This process indicates that the council regards the voting of the community as a suggestion and reserves the right to override it as they like.
http://openmandriva.org/2013/03/the-magnificent-7/

Vote for a Face! has ended, and public has pronounced its favorites. Now is time for OpenMandriva Association (OMA) to choose the Final Logo for the Association.

I don't know what alternative got the most votes - there is a list with cryptic numbers but an actual image of the winning "face" and the runner ups according to the community is not to much to ask.
It might all be good but I miss the "proper" openness. And if they chose something else than the top vote without an open explanation then I would never listen to the talk of "proper" "legal" and "democratic" again

It seems to be a challenge that the very name of the Association is tied to Mandriva SA and needs the consent of Mandriva SA. That cannot be avoided if they want to use the Mandriva name.

And everyone agrees that there is a distro to attend to

We are back to work. We have a release to attend to.

Cooker does get regular updates but I cannot detect any real progress with my main issues. I am stuck with 1028x764 in my VM and forced to use the VESA driver.
This should get high priority because Mandriva mostly lives in VM's these days.
KDE does work fine but the metapackages for installing other DE's are broken and so is the task-lamp-php server install. There are a lot of dependencies to attend to.

[viking60]

I did some research:
Here are the top three results of the community vote according to the official openmandriva site

#18 (SQ018) 74 37.00%
#21 (SQ021) 73 36.50%
#19 (SQ019) 54 27.00%

This is no 18 and apperantly the winner with 37% of 200 valid votes here

This is no 19 in third spot with 27% of the votes:

So the winner and the runner up seem to have been ignored - can anyone explain this?

[rolf]

The name “Moondrake” and the domain are owned by Mandriva SA.

I did not know that Moondrake was owned by Mandriva SA.
And it does not compute with:

Per Øyvind has violated the agreements and decisions that OMA made using legitimate democratic procedures thus breaking the core principles of a community organization. Moreover, he tried to technically hijack the project and release a distribution under his name.

Because it is not his name.

Lebedeff is Russian, making her choice of words ambivalent, at times. I don't know about ownership of "Moondrake", don't care. I did read something from Per recently where he proposed usage of the word Mandriva that would not be allowed. Maybe I was confused by one person using English as a second language or maybe he was confused about using English as a second language but people using English as a second language finding flaws in each others statements is like shooting fish in a barrel. It's easy to twist meanings and obscure facts. I take "under his name" to mean how he has, by himself, USURPED THE NECESSARY AUTHORITY, CREDO, MANIFEST OF THE ASSOCIATION, which, as I say over and over, is the problem.

Regardig the part where OMA is the community, they seem to doubt this themselves - or else they would simply decide a temporary name after a "proper common group decision":

....so can we agree on having no-name now, not to go into that? The issue caused enough trouble already.
Reason is simple: if we were to decide now, how would we do that? Vote? By who?
Just decision of several people? Who?

Toss a coin or accept Moondrake - If the Council cannot even manage that - what do we need them for? I don't care. The final name can be dealt with "properly" but there seems to be no clear idea of what that is.

Sure, throw out Council, very helpful. If you reject the basic premise of this work, go do your own distro, again. Part of the slowness is natural. I can't change that. I've seen the progress and support what the contributors are doing. Per has halted this process by himself. Now, perhaps, it will start its slow progress, again. The holes are there big enough to drive a truck through. This makes easy opportunity for the trolls. Kate speaks of OMA being the community and that is the MANIFEST. At this point, it is not sufficiently formed for normal democratic operations but I have seen how it is heading in that direction. It needs to recover from from Per's wildcat strike and start moving in that direction, again.

They offer to assist Per Øyvind in requesting the name for his own fork - But never even considered to approach Mandriva SA on behalf of the community to make Moondrake a candidate for the distro name at hand.

So what? They walked on eggshells to not disrupt Per, despite the disruption he caused, once it was clear he would not go along with everybody else, including TC "(TC (Technical committee, currently all active developers)". Yes, Virginia, there are developers.

Will I be offered assistance in starting my own fork if I suggest a name they don't like? Will anyone disagreeing strongly enough get the same "generous" offer?

Open the dictionary to "straw man" and this is what you will find. I'm tired of talking to straw men.

[jkerr82508]

If I had to chose from among the top three, I would choose the one that they chose. This may suggest that the people running OMA are a bit like me. If that is so, then god help OMA.

Jim

[rolf]

So the winner and the runner up seem to have been ignored - can anyone explain this?

They took your advice. They flipped a coin.

[viking60]

@rolf
Hey you are talking to me - make no mistake about it.
You are supporting OMA and advocating that -fair enough - leave the short sighted and tunnel-visioned descriptions out of it.

By the looks of it OMA are ignoring the community or do you have an explanation for the choice of the entry that got 10 % less votes from the community?
I thought you were such a strong supporter of the community? It sure does not look to be the same thing as OMA.....

@Jkerr
Fair enough. But why announce the contest then? You are saying that the majority can be ignored for the higher purpose (of you liking it ) pretty much the same thing as proyvind is accused of....
I find it deceiving and dishonest for OMA to claim the proper and democratic highground after that (If there is no explanation).

[Woodguy2]

What ever else you can say about the decision, They did tell us in advance what they were going to do...

by João Patrício

View the entire set of logo submissions in the imgur album titled Get a Face!.

First of all, we would like to thank everyone who participated and submitted their proposals to the OpenMandriva Association. Now the next phase shall commence, starting with the verification of proposals that are valid and compliant, including making sure these do not conflict with any question of intellectual property. The submissions will then be put to a public vote. In the end the most voted on submissions will be placed for consideration by the administration of the Association, which will vote on the final proposal. We are delighted as the competition approaches the finish line.

(emphasis is mine!)

And they did. I don't seem to recall anyone complaining then... would have been the time to complain, no?

Personally I liked the one that won the most votes best. But I am in no way unhappy with the OMA's choice either.

All that said, what happened to putting all time and effort into getting a distro out? Complaining about how a logo was selected isn't helping accomplish that!

[rolf]

All that said, what happened to putting all time and effort into getting a distro out? Complaining about how a logo was selected isn't helping accomplish that!

Exactly. I trust these people as I've watched every step of the way how they have handled the process. The process has flaws and takes time, which can be tolerated by the tolerant. The main goal is to have a distro. From my first Mandrake, I am only one of many whose primary role is consumer, also sharing some support and bug reports @ bugzilla. The primary production process is out of my hands.

As I said, there are endless opportunities for nitpickers, for those who have not availed themselves of the public records of the genesis of OMA, to find fault. Yet, it's a work in progress. I've got time. Those who don't have the patience and the tolerance cannot make it happen faster any more than I can. For those, there are other choices. The criticism born of partial understanding helps no one.

[viking60]

What ever else you can say about the decision, They did tell us in advance what they were going to do...

by João Patrício

View the entire set of logo submissions in the imgur album titled Get a Face!.

First of all, we would like to thank everyone who participated and submitted their proposals to the OpenMandriva Association. Now the next phase shall commence, starting with the verification of proposals that are valid and compliant, including making sure these do not conflict with any question of intellectual property. The submissions will then be put to a public vote. In the end the most voted on submissions will be placed for consideration by the administration of the Association, which will vote on the final proposal. We are delighted as the competition approaches the finish line.

(emphasis is mine!)

And they did. I don't seem to recall anyone complaining then... would have been the time to complain, no?

Well search this forum again and you will see me complaining - at the right time. I think proyvind did complain - how many does it take?
viewtopic.php?f=32&t=2541&start=12#p15086

(I am sure rolf will confirm it because he has read it all and has absolute knowledge - and he will now seriously dislike you on the account of your partial knowledge )

Do not get me wrong I think the logo they picked is just fine. I also think they would have saved a helluva time by just picking it without arranging a pointless vote (and I like those MiB guys).

An yes that makes the discussion about the name ridiculous. Just decide with the courage to stand up for it - rather than hiding behind democracy and procedures.

Saying up front that they will not respect the majority vote does not make it any more democratic, neither does the fact that it takes an extremely long time.

That way everyone can get back to working on the distro - that is what I support.

Edit: After having arranged the vote and having ignored one entry that got 37% and one that got 36,5% for one that got 27% -they will always have to live with the fact that they knowingly did ignore the majority in the community. and that they did not care to explain. How smart is that?
And I do not mean to be intolerant ( It may sound like that but if you read both rolf and my and proyvinds stuff I think all sides are covered) I am not an uncritical fanboy either. So when they go wrong IMO (it happens) and want to repeat the error (logo first now name) I will feel free to criticize it.

[Woodguy2]

They could just as well have picked 5 entries themselves and had a vote for just the five. The community did pick the 5 finalists as it were.

Also apparently close to 10% of the voters tried to vote more than once!(or 1 voter voted many times..not sure which). Such are the problems with pure democracy. On any given day a "majority of voters" could have picked "Crapola" for a name with a picture of a cow pie for a logo. That's one of the reasons for an association... to provide some form of sanity check. I know that is a rather extreme example. But that is the job of the association, to give the project direction and to keep some level of sanity. Whatever means they use will never satisfy everyone.

Complaining on a forum that possibly(or perhaps even probably) is not read by the OMA members is about as useful as complaining about developers choices on a support forum... the people that need to know your opinion, won't. It may make you feel better, but it too many cases, it just causes discontent, frustration, and anger. Look at what happened to the Mandriva forum the last couple of years.

If you are really unhappy with the way the OMA is doing business, my suggestion is join(assuming you have not already) the OMA and help them make it better, or at least let them know your opinion, But a civil attitude, and civil discussion goes way farther than what I see on many forums! And just for the record this forum is way more civil than some I have seen!

Scraping the existing Association and starting over as I have seen suggested, is certainly NOT going to speed things up!

Just sayin...


Edit: And yes I know the situation with Mandriva SA was a lot of the reason for many people leaving, bur many also left because of the hostile attitude that became common place.

[viking60]

I am not hostile - any one saying that will get a kick in the but! Making a suggestion of 5 first and then put it out to the vote would have been an entirely different thing. Well if the top vote was accepted.
And as you say nobody is probably reading this anyway so how can they be intimidated?
I have registered in the forum but I have been thrown out again due to the changing or re-arranging but that is OK since they have been open about that it could happen.
I was asked to moderate the Scandinavian section (As I have done in the old forum) and said yes - and then I did not hear anymore....
That is probably just as well since there is no big Scandinavia market for Mandriva anymore.

So I will accept errors and quirks under the presumption that "nothing done" equals "nothing done wrong".
But that self indulging talk of proper democracy used as a way to lift themselves way above proyvind made me a bit sick.

But a civil attitude, and civil discussion goes way farther than what I see on many forums! And just for the record this forum is way more civil than some I have seen

Thanks - that is because we have quality people like Rolf, you and proyvind - to make things interesting. (And I am I nice guy too - but if you tell anyone I will have to kill you! My berserk image could't take it)