Re: Need Leadership

["Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen" <mikkel kamstrup gmail com>]

2008/6/21 Luis Villa <luis tieguy org>:
> On Sat, Jun 21, 2008 at 11:26 AM, Havoc Pennington <hp pobox com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> 2008/6/21 Jason D. Clinton <me jasonclinton com>:
>>> In my opinion, whatever "The Next-Gen Gnome" is, it isn't going to happen
>>> until we really, really have a deep maintenance cycle going on here. That
>>> means fixing a Handful of Giant Warts on our maintenance process:
>>
>> I bet the next-gen gnome will happen when someone writes it. I would
>> suggest people think in terms of getting something going by
>> themselves, and once it's at least roughly usable, think about
>> recruiting 2 or 3 or 5 other people to the project. But getting
>> hundreds of people to agree up front isn't too likely. Think 5 not
>> 500.
>
> +1. This is not a gigantic company- you don't have to persuade the
> management to get permission to innovate. You have the code, and
> potentially you have the idea. So JFDI. If it is worthwhile, more
> people will come.

I believe that what you and Havoc propose here is plain naiive. The
landscape has changed since Gnome 2.0. Coorporations have grown,
expectations are climbing each day, both from users and developers. I
believe Gnome to be in a Nash equilibrium[1] from a developer's pow.
New developers will basically have to come from Gnome or XFCE. Green
developers have next to no chance of following the bumpy ride in the
start and little motivation to do so because they have Gnome and XFCE
as alternatives.

It is going to take a handful skilled hackers with basically unlimited
patience (to withstand flames and rants) and spare time to make a
"fork" viable. By "fork" I mean a fork of Gnome the project, not Gnome
the software stack, because that is basically what is needed. I agree
that 100s of developers are not needed.

On top of that some coorporation with Gnome needs to happen to avoid
making the same mistakes. I think we all know the history of software
companies that hires a new staff to do a rewrite of their flagship
product :-)

The thing that _has_ changed since Gnome 2.0 days is that we have a
much better development environment to work in, namely Gnome 2 :-)

Cheers,
Mikkel

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium