Re: About The GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initative

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri aracnet com>]

On Sat, Apr 21, 2007 at 03:19:48PM +0200, Thilo Pfennig wrote:
> I have thought long about this initiative. I would not generally
> consider this a bad thing, but:
>
> a) I do not like that this was not discussed at all in the marketing
> list. Such major things and announcement have to be discussed with at
> least the marketing team

When you are involving companies there is a certain amount of
discretion that is involved.  Look at the list of companies.
It's part of dealing with the corporate world.  I think our
representatives have our trust and I think that is all that is
important.

> b) I fear that this is in fact a movement away from the desktop
> platform. I would rahther have suggested to found a new organisation
> to do this because mobile devices are not really desktops.

What is an embedded platform other than a specialized desktop.
In fact some of the discussions we talk about (eg screen real estate,
800x600 vs 1280x1024) gives them greater importance.  I don't think
the issues we discuss are going to change much.

Morever, as a project we have to go where the market is going.
We should be happy that we are ahead of the game and have an
initiative with major players in the industry.  I'm surprised we
aren't more excited than we are.


> c) In relation to that i fear that this binds ressources that
> otherwise would have been there for the core desktop.

The people doing embedded GUI are already captured resources and
are now being paid to work on GNOME whether embedded or otherwise.
Interestingly enough with more players in the GNOME market means
GNOME is more important and people working on GNOME are going to be
able to work on their favourite past time and be able to pay for it.

> I know - many things are now developed for embedded devices already
> and I also think that his is nice and cool but this truely is a whole
> different issue. We even did not manage to get our web site updated in
> time, wether for GNOME 2.18 nor 2.18.1 - so still many core tasks are
> not solved and yet we are going into new directions without further
> consultation of the marketing team.

That seems to be a problem with getting experienced web people.
I don't see how that affects people working on the core desktop.
We need to attract web developers to help us make a decent website.
People migrate to where they are interested in.  The infrastructure
portion of GNOME has always been resource starved because people
are more interested in the coding.  Doing an embedded platform
doesn't change that.

> I would like to know how this decision was made and why. And if you
> really think that GNOME can really develop two platforms (mostly
> standard desktop and embedded). I dont think so. And to me it looks
> like GNOME changes direction.

Well who got us thus far in the embedded space?  Certainly GNOME
didn't conciously did it.  Nokia and others invested their
time and money into it.  New market and a major hiring spree.
People working on GNOME are already being stolen with the promise
of working on GNOME embedded as their day jobs and perhaps GNOME
in general outside of that. :-)

> PS: At least we should discuss now what this really means for us now.
> And what it means for marketing GNOME.

Indeed.  Let's discuss that.

sri

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