Re: About The GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initative

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri aracnet com>]

On Sun, 2007-04-22 at 12:27 +0200, Thilo Pfennig wrote:
> On 4/21/07, Sriram Ramkrishna <sri aracnet com> wrote:
> > On Sat, Apr 21, 2007 at 03:19:48PM +0200, Thilo Pfennig wrote:
>
>
> > > 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.
>
> Ok, thats a ood point. But still it is a switch in focus, isn't it? I
> understand that no every project can be talked about publically but

Is it?  How much?  Avahi is in the embedded initiative.  Lennart is
still going to be doing the same things he was doing earlier.  He might
be getting more patches from Nokia and Intel perhaps to deal with their
platforms.  But it doesn't change much.  Intel is going to be talking
with Nokia regarding the Hildon platform.  Intel might be sending
patches to GTK+ regarding bugs or what not.  The players in each of
these parts are going to be pretty much doing the same thing.  There
might be new avenues of discussion but I still see people pretty much
doing the same thing they were doing earlier.  I think we're just doing
a formal recognition of work that is already on-going.  We would be
fools not to recognize it.  The embedded space is going to create a
strong recognition (I hope!) of the GNOME/GTK+ brand even more than the
desktop since these days the GNOME desktop is marketed more as:

* SLED10 desktop
* Fedora Core Desktop

GNOME hardly gets much mention and it's really about the distribution.
(something I would like to see changed myself, but that's another topic)

> the question is if such a major step should not be discussed inside a
> broader part of the public. I do not mean the details of  the deal but
> about the changes that are implied. Ok, if all will follow (developers
> and users) this will work. But if not we would have a deal that does
> not work. Ok maybe I am being too sceptical.

Last GUADEC, I interviewed the various new 'GNOME' companies that have
been started by entrepreneurs in our community and it seemed very
apparent that Nokia was single-handedly creating a embedded space market
based on GNOME over the past 18 months or so hiring GNOME developers and
X developers and moving them to Finland as well as investing in other
companies to work other parts.  I realized that Nokia was very serious
in creating a market.  I would not be surprised now that Intel has
joined, that Palm won't follow.  You can bet that other companies are
watching.

What I'm saying is that the clues were already out there.  I wasn't
privy to anything the board was doing but when I connected the dots it
was quite clear.  So I wasn't very surprised about this announcement.
It made perfect sense.  For some reason I seem to recall hearing about
such an initiative.  I don't know if that was some ad hoc discussion
somewhere or what.  Perhaps, we are probably guilty of not talking about
the embedded space at all.  We've been mostly been working on the
website and getting that going.

> The thing about focus is difficult. Web applications are also part of
> the desktop - but is currently not really on our focus.

I think Red Hat is working on such a convergence.  Certainly the merging
of social networking and the desktop is something we should be also
starting in my opinion.  The framework needs to work on a bit more.  The
framework will also aid the embedded space with ready applications for
"on the go" teens.

> So question is: Does GNOME just go where the money is or does GNOME
> have a vision? These are point that should not be excluding each
> other, but I think its important to know how things are moving or are
> decided.

GNOME in part goes where our developers are interested in.  GNOME isn't
making money off embedded space.  Nokia and Intel are.  We have the
benefit of more people eyeballs looking at improving our platform.
GUADEC is getting a lot of high profile sponsors.

IMHO GNOME should be a ubiquitous platform to create a great user
friendly desktop.  Perhaps the desktop platform is a reference platform
that we can show off to the world but certainly others like Novell are
making GNOME into their vision of what the desktop should be.  Our jobs
is to create brand identity, to create a market, and to bring new
contributors into our project by God have fun doing it. :-)  One thing
we should do is not to take ourselves too seriously.


> I think we had lengthy discussions in the past how GNOME marketing
> should be and also we talked about who we should talk to. As it comes
> out it looks like the REAL marketing has not much todo with what we
> discussed. That said I dont think that this is generally bad. But I
> think our discussions and what we do should reflect each other.

Agreed.  But I really grow tired of the marketing discussions.  If I
ever have to go through another "What is GNOME?" thread I will grow
quite depressed.

> If I look at GnomeMarketing page this does not reflect our new focus.
> I do not see embedded hardware vendors as a primary target group. This
> means that we did not see this coming? Or maybe it just means that
> those who saw it never entered any informations about it.

That sounds more like just people are lazy and haven't gotten around to
it.  I mean, look at developer.gnome.org.  It's so full of old crap it's
not even funny.  We just hate documentation ;)

> This makes any marketing discussion based on old goals and assumptions
>  senseless and shallow.

Maybe overly harsh, don't you think?

sri

-- 
Sriram Ramkrishna <sri aracnet com>