Re: Thoughs about communication

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

On Thu, Jan 26, 2017 at 8:56 PM, Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me> wrote:

...

My two cents, and bear with me on my slight rant - I really hate the idea of depending on a web app like riot.  It's like admitting that we've lost the whole application space and that we're going browser.  I know that is not what is intended, but that will be the perception.  

I'd like to do this, but I'd like to start putting resources into creating a viable chat client that works and is designed as a competition to a web app.  Maybe that means some kind of contest or something.  I'm not really worried about actually writing one after all matrix is an open standard, but the design one that shows the advantage of running something native should be a challenge that we need to meet head on.

...

While a native chat application would be nice, making it a requirement would be a real mistake in my opinion. A couple of reasons for that:

First, chat is fragmented. There's no common standard, and whatever we choose is going to be one player among many. That puts it in a different category from many of our core applications.

Second, the GNOME developer community is already spread too thin. One of the most pressing questions we have right now is how we can focus our efforts on critical areas. In order to do that, we need to leverage other projects and initiatives when it benefits us. Because when we try to do everything in house, it hurts us, whether it's maintaining our own infrastructure, writing our own tools, or implementing every app ourselves. We end up being stuck behind the curve.

Obviously we're a community project and people will work on whatever itch they want to scratch. I wouldn't discourage someone from working on something if that's what they want to do. But that's different from making native apps a hard requirement in cases like this.

We need to learn to tread lightly, embrace new things, and recognise that we can't do everything ourselves. If we do that, I think we could find ourselves in a pretty exciting place.

Allan