direction [Re: slab menu]

[Dan Winship <danw novell com>]

On Tue, 2007-02-06 at 11:35 +0000, Alex Jones wrote:
> Let's face it, slab was conceived out of Novell's desire to make SuSE a
> drop-in for Windows.
> 
> I don't think this is the direction we want to be taking GNOME,
> personally.

The problem is that the community doesn't know what direction it wants
GNOME to move in, and so some people are pulling one way, and some are
pulling another way, and the vectors all sum to zero. And then Novell
comes along and starts pulling strongly towards "Windows replacement
desktop for big companies", and no one else is pulling very hard in the
opposite direction, and so awayyyy we go!

Possible solutions:
     1. Convince Novell that its current "sell to big companies"
        business plan is foolish, and there's much more money to be made
        in selling software to teenagers
     2. Stop accepting contributions to GNOME from Novell
     3. Add mandatory pornographic desktop wallpapers to the release, to
        pull GNOME in the opposite direction from "corporate desktop"
     4. Give up on the idea of there being One True GNOME and one
        Desktop release for everyone, and instead let
        packagers/distributors decide what pieces (slab
        +control-center-shell / old main menu+control center menu items)
        will work best for their users

-- Dan