Getting Things Done

This is apparently not the philosophy that Jeff Waugh follows. About 5 or 6 months ago, I yet again, brought a couple of rather important issues, concerning Planet GNOME to his attention. One of which, had been consistently brought up by others in the community before that time.

For quite a long time now, Planet GNOME has been quasi-maintained. It is very difficult to get changes made due to the lack of responsiveness from Jeff. But as a GNOME site and service, why is it not maintained by the infrastructure team? Why is it such a pain in the ass for foundation members to get their blog syndicated on planet? It's not exactly the Journal. Of course, that's not to say that Jeff isn't working on a long-term solution. He's apparently been working on it for quite a long time, and to no avail. Because, when I asked 5 or 6 months ago, I was told it would be in place "in a couple weeks." Now that it's April, I'm very much wondering where that solution is, as I'm sure plenty of others are as well. Being a GNOME site, and hosted on the GNOME server, and aggregating feeds of GNOME developers and contributors, or even users or people who've seemingly stopped doing anything with GNOME at all, one would think it should be possible for GNOME developers to fix issues with the site when they come up.

Apparently not though. At least, not unless your name happens to appear on The List. Recently, yet another person who has had their requests go long ignored by Jeff, had asked me to help them get their blog on Planet GNOME. As a caring, community-minded developer, I of course offered to help, and proceeded to do so, mediating the request to Jeff, and hoping to get any sort of reasonable response. But alas, the only response was that he had already responded to the original requestor. A response that person never actually received. After requesting a resend of that response to multiple addresses of the requestor, there was no response. As we all know, silence is compliance, and so I decided to go ahead and commit the change myself. Of course, I am not on that special list, so it didn't stay committed long, but did manage to stay in for more than 24 hours. A surprising feat, given Jeff's attitude.

The second item of concern, is that the "no floating head" icon fails to comply with both the GPL 2 and Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 licenses, which the two pieces that make it up, are licensed under. I brought this up several times before, and again 5 or 6 months ago. And then, I was told by Jeff that he would ping Andreas about it soon, and have the issue resolved. Still no resolution, and Jeff having never contacted Andreas about the issue, I decided to fix it myself. A simple removal of the construction hat is optimal, as not everyone on Planet GNOME is a developer, and the person icon is from gnome-icon-theme and GPL. It was also reverted, and now the license violating icon is back. No viable reason for doing so. It's just how Jeff wants things. Perhaps he should read the licenses, before deciding to willfully not comply with their requirements, as he is also doing on his personal site, using Tango Icon Theme icons, yet not providing attribution to the Tango Desktop Project, as the license requires one to do, when using the images.

It's really rather upsetting that we have a site like this, and it is supposed to be for the community and by the community. I guess Jeff is really the only member of that community though. It's his site right, and he's paying for the hosting, so he can upgrade it to unstable versions of software as he pleases, breaking the live site. And he can he can limit the feeds to only those that he cares to read, and willfully violate license agreements, as he so pleases.

Jeff, if you want to be a fascist drama queen about the site, please move it to your own busted site, and let the community decide and do what's best for the community, with Planet GNOME. Oh, and by the way, what ever happened to the 10x10 plan? Dropped the ball on that one too didn't you?

Syndicated 2008-04-21 02:13:45 from dobey's blog