Hi,
Selon Thilo Pfennig <tp alternativ net>:
I would say: make the best Desktop available. Be better than the
others. Do we have a concrete audience?
Public sector. Free software has a lot to offer here, and GNOME is
well placed for the market.
ISVs. Get people building software on our stack, contributing to the
ecosystem.
Windows users. Get great GTK+/GNOME apps built for Win32 installed on
computers, and lower the barrier from moving to 100% GNOME.
Why are we using GNOME instead of X,Y,Z?
Easy to learn, easy to use. Power without complication. Simplicity
without compromise. Doesn't get in the way.
What is GNOME btw?
Above all else, GNOME is the community. Then, GNOME is the platform -
the ability to integrate and interoperate transparently between
applications developed coherently in parallel (a shared technical
vision to go with our shared cultural vision).
What if I use the GNOME desktop and a non-GNOME (KDE)
application? Am I a GNOME user or a KDE user?
GNOME.
And if I would use KDE and use GNOME-applications?
KDE. But a little bit GNOME too :)
So: What is a GNOME user?
It's not black & white (except sometimes it is). A Linux or Unix user
who chooses GNOME as his desktop environment is a GNOME user. A
Windows user who is using the GIMP, Inkscape, GAIM, XChat, Abiword and
a bunch of other GTK+ or GNOME based applications is a GNOME user
tryoing to escape from Windows. A KDE user who runs a couple of GTK+
applications is a KDE user who runs a couple of GTK+ applications.
What importance does freedesktop has for GNOME?
Vital. GNOME developers wouldn't be working on freedesktop standards
(and creating freedesktop in the first place) if we didn't think that
defining interfaces to allow interoperability wasn't important. We
want the user to be able to start a KDE application, cut & paste from
a GNOME app and have that Just Work. We want printing, help, docs and
other subsystems shared so that you can read your GNOME help in Konq,
or print a document from KWord and Abiword on the same machine. This
is a no-brainer.
If we want to reach a
goal like 10x10 would this mean to reach that goals by all means
necessary (even harm KDE?)?
No. Although reaching 10% of the globval desktop market will
inevitably put us into conflict with KDE at some stage, I'd like to
believe that it will stay at friendly rivalry.
What is the current situation with OpenOffice.org?
OpenOffice.org is currently a 3rd party application using the GNOME
framework for at least some builds (the Ximian OO.o GNOME builds). It
is currently the best available office suite, and integrates pretty
well with GNOME.
I got a very mixes
picture. On the one hand there is the Gnome-Office project which
consist of Abiword and Gnumeric (right?).
And GNOME-DB, yeah.
On the other hand Openoffice.org is
not GNOME but is somehow an important part in argumentation, but not
really loved by GNOME people?
That's right. It's an essential part of any switch argument, but isn't
really a GNOME program (in philosophy or community). There are people
who work on both (Michael Meeks is a long-time GNOME contributor). But
it's fair to say that GNOME developers consider OOo to be outside the
GNOME sphere. Whereas Abiword and GNUMeric are very much inside that
sphere. I see no ambiguity in saying "there's a credible competitor to
the leading office suite, and it integrates well with GNOME" on the
one hand, and saying "Here's some great GNOME office software" on the
other.
Same with Mozilla. Mozilla is somehow
essential and there is cooperation, but the goals are ver different.
There are some nasty bugs that are quite annoying in the GNOME
defautl browser Epiphany that the Mozilla people do not fix, as they
have workarounds in their applications. Ubuntu and Fedora choose
Firefox as their default browser. This was a major set back in my
eyes -a nd I really did not understand why the GNOME default browser
was not default on the GNOME Live-CD.
Because we started on Ubuntu.
Look, don't over-analyse the Mozilla thing. the Mozilla foundation see
themselves as a mass-market 3rd party software package now. That's
where they want to be, and they have good momentum. Statistics like
percentage of the browser market are important to them. The Linux
distributions want to be able to say "We ship with Firefox!" because
firefox is a well-known free software package. That's a business
decision, not a technology decision.
For marketing I think these mixed messages are poison.
Not really. Don't over-dramatise things which are only known and
important in our own little world. As you said earlier, most users
don't care about issues like OOo and Firefox. Both use GTK+ as their
toolkit on Linux, and are essential items in the list of bullet points
that you give people when they ask "what software can I have on
Linux?" - they're not GNOME, but they're part of the typical GNOME
desktop.
Maybe there should be more
talk from GNOME marketing to Mozilla marketing if developers from
both sides do not find together.
What makes you think there isn't?
Cheers,
Dave.
--
Dave Neary
Lyon, France
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