What about Embedded?

["Sean Kelley" <sean sweng gmail com>]

Indeed, I find it ironic that in light of recent moves to expand the
Gnome tent to include Mobile and Embedded devices as at GUADEC this
year, that there is at the same time an effort to push MONO into the
stack.  At what price are these moves being made or considered?  Like
Havoc said, innovation at the cost of performance and memory usage is
not innovation in my book.

One item that Jeff mentioned at GUADEC that I recall is that it is not
far from reality that their will be more Gnome embedded/mobile devices
than desktop installs at some future date.  This sort of development
is going on full speed.

I personally think more thought needs to be put into the decision than
simply the inclusion of pet applications.

Sean

On 7/16/06, Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com> wrote:
> Iain * wrote:
> >
> > Really?
> > depends on your context...
> > For some people a terminal and text editor are completely worthless,
> > but take away photo management....
> >
> > Once again, who are we targetting with the desktop. Apple know who
> > they're targetting, which is probably why text editor and terminal are
> > not high on the list of features.
> >
>
> Yes! I was hoping your thread about this would catch fire instead of the
>   one about mono, because answering the "what is gnome anyhow?" question
> would make the mono-type debates much simpler.
>
> If GNOME can't figure out a way to answer that question, its only option
> is to be a platform provider for Elisa, Maemo, SLED, Fedora, Ubuntu,
> Palm, Firefox, WINE, etc. etc. Those are all more focused, more
> target-audience-decided-upon solutions that in many cases use GNOME
> technology but diverge to a small or large extent from the GNOME desktop
> release because guess what, actually shipping something useful requires
> more focused, specific thinking.
>
> There's nothing wrong with the platform provider path, and it's probably
> inevitable by inertia and industry dynamic, but if taking that path it'd
> be interesting to do it consciously and optimize GNOME as a platform
> provider - with the providers of all those more focused solutions as the
> primary customers. And this _also_ helps answer the Mono debate - the
> question would become how to best serve the specific solutions and the
> teams building them.
>
> To me there are two hard parts to answering the target audience / what
> is GNOME question:
>   1) how does "GNOME" decide anything? it's a big swarm of people
>   2) which audience or focus to choose?
>
> Here's one way one might approach it.
>
> : Step 1. Collect underpants.
>
> j/k
>
> : Step 1. Redefine GNOME as in the original charter; provide an open
> source computing platform to the general public. Do this on the
> foundation level and get wide buy-in. Hammer the message consistently
> through the web site and other communications. The goal is to fight off
> the "GNOME = desktop environment" legacy.
>
> Note, "platform" in the charter I think has to be understood as
> "environment" or "solution" not as "APIs" - might be worth officially
> rewording in that way. In fact, I think it has to include both software
> bits AND finding some way to work with "content" and "online services"
> if there's a serious interest in offering open source alternatives to
> today's proprietary software companies.
>
> So, let's assume "platform" includes all that stuff for purposes of
> redefining GNOME in this way.
>
> : Step 2. Kill the single "desktop" release and replace it with
> target-audience-specific/solution-to-problem-specific more focused
> releases. For example, while they may not be interested, Maemo and Elisa
> would be candidates. The current "desktop release" should become one
> thing among peers; or it's even worth considering splitting it up to be
> multiple peers.
>
> Don't call the desktop release "desktop" either because it's too vague.
> More specific examples might be an "enterprise unix/linux GUI" release,
> or "tech-oriented consumer/hobbyist" release or "tech workstation
> release" or "high-powered MS Office user in an office release" or
> "computer lab / thin client release" or whatever people feel is the
> right focus.
>
> The word "desktop" is like a cancer. Its problems include:
>   - it's vague as hell - includes a zillion target audiences and apps
>   - it accepts an existing category definition (essentially, "what
>     windows and mac are") thus precluding meaningful innovation
>   - it excludes "content" and "online services" -
>     key elements of all the new stuff going on in the tech
>     industry today
>
> The huge debate here is how to split things up; the important thing to
> remember is that there can be lots of code sharing (where it makes
> sense) between related offerings. So e.g. almost everything could use
> GTK, but only some offerings might want the GNOME panel.
>
> i.e., doing the split by _codebase_ is wrong; the split is by _target
> audience_ and _focus_; some splits might be worthwhile _just to change
> the default config options_ even.
>
> The technology can be made to support such things, and in fact it should
> be made to do so.
>
> Also of course, the split depends on having volunteers to "own" each
> release.
>
> The counterintuitive and hard-to-accept reality is that trying to be
> universal just leads to being vague and useless. The right approach is
> to try to be specific (and useful), then factor out common elements
> between multiple specific solutions, resulting in a platform. aka "top down"
>
> This is happening de facto _anyway_! Look at all the different things
> people are building on GNOME tech. It's just that GNOME is not
> acknowledging it, and not taking credit for it. GNOME still sits here
> claiming to be a "desktop" and that's a very limited view.
>
>
> A couple other notes:
>
>   - something like http://live.gnome.org/Personas is not helpful, because
>     it's way too broad. Need to pick only some of the people there, and
>     then (even harder) pick only some of the activities listed there that
>     the people are doing. Or better, find new activities they aren't
>     doing but would like to do, and offer something for that.
>
>   - look just within the "linux distribution" space for huge diversity.
>      - Federico's deployment study revealed that most current users
>        are the "government/edu computer lab, often with thin client"
>        variety and the main needs are e.g. management/admin tools
>      - I would say GNOME upstream isn't primarily focused on this, but
>        on the Fedora/Ubuntu "tech enthusiast consumer" kind of people
>        offering a kind of "play with technology" platform
>      - SLED (and Ximian, Bluecurve / Red Hat 8, etc. before that along
>        the same lines) has its main features oriented in some other
>        direction still, which I won't try to summarize for fear of
>        getting it wrong
>
>     For any of these focuses, GNOME could be much better. e.g. the
>     age-old "remove crack" vs. "don't dumb it down" debate is essentially
>     a target audience confusion among some of the above.
>
>     BUT more importantly - there are so many audiences and solutions
>     beyond these, and we see companies pursuing them with GNOME tech,
>     while GNOME itself is stuck in its Linux distribution history.
>
>   - again, there's really nothing wrong with the platform provider angle;
>     but it could be done better and more strongly by focusing on it
>     deliberately. For example: change my "step 1" above to revise the
>     charter so instead of "general public" the goal is "provide a
>     platform for organizations building focused solutions [insert some
>     kind of qualifier on kind of solution - GUI? consumer? I don't know]"
>
>   - look how broken even the subject line of this thread is without
>     having any real focus - is innovation valuable at all? (for
>     "unix replacement" customers the answer is mostly _no_).
>     in what direction should the innovation move? who does it benefit?
>     does innovation outweigh increased memory usage? (for tech
>     enthusiasts probably yes, for thin clients and Maemo probably no,
>     etc.)
>
>   - Once "what is gnome?" gets hashed out it's essential to drive clear
>     communication about the solution throughout the project: the charter,
>     the web site, the mailing list names and divisions, the release team
>     roles, reach out to certain external projects... everywhere the
>     concept "desktop" is used to define the project, it needs to be
>     remapped to a set of distinctions around focused benefits for
>     specific people.
>
> Anyway, while I'm advocating a thread about a perhaps a much larger can
> of worms than this whole mono thing, it's also a much more _useful_ can
> of worms (and might help solve stuff like the mono debate as a side
> effect). It also sheds enormous light on some past conflicts (e.g. the
> whole OpenOffice/Firefox vs. native GNOME stuff debate).
>
> Havoc
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