Re: On breaking the woohoo barrier...thoughts on how GNOME can get great

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri aracnet com>]

On Thu, Jul 13, 2006 at 10:37:34PM +0100, Iain * wrote:
> Some questions that I don't have answers for:
> 
> Does GNOME have a "product" to market? How many people really get
> GNOME from GNOME as opposed to the distros? Is it more the distros
> place to take the software we write and put it together as a cool
> package that gets marketed as "Do cool stuff" as opposed to GNOME
> which we market as "Has support for 52 different languages..."

IMHO, the product we sell is "usability".  We take the scary and
confusing world of computers and try to make it conform into a system
that is both simple yet powerful enough to let a wide variety of people
to be able to use it effectively.  These people can be those who
who want to participate in the online culture, manage their financial life, 
or to enjoy a game or two.  We want to enable that without the stress
that's usually involved in doing it.  "Just Works" right? As the user
intended?  Maybe. :-) 

> How does the knowledge that we need software X work in a free software
> world where people work on whatever they feel like? We have no
> managers who can say "We need an instant messenger" and put 10 people
> to work on it. How does it affect our module selection process to be
> looking for "Doing cool things" rather than any software that meets
> the release criteria?

I think it depends on how you frame the problem.  People work on
something if the problem is interesting enough.  Let's take for
instance documentation, which for a lot of us, is uninteresting.
But this year we've been able to grow that team because the team
was able to attract volunteers who are interested in solving the
documetnation problem.  I know now at least 2 people who are asking
questions on the lists which haven't happened for a long time.

I think it comes down to finding and attracting volunteers who
can solve the problems we need to solve.  How does one do that?
I'm not sure, but we do seem to be reaching people.

But take note, that we have been solving (most of) our problems with
the resources we have.  Granted a lot of us in GNOME are employed to
work on them, but I don't think our problems are any different than
other open source projects and they tend to get things done as well
that needs to be done.

My two cents.

sri

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