Re: GNOME SWOT Analysis

[Juanjo Marin <juanjomarin96 yahoo es>]

On Thu, 2010-04-01 at 08:30 +0200, Claus Schwarm wrote:

Hi Claus !

> I think you've done quite a good job! Especially concerning the
> concerns... I was amazed reading that someone thought about all these.
> And I really like how you tried to link each SWOT point to a certain
> objective or attribute.

Well, thanks for  the nice words, but I only put on a paper all the
concerns I've found everywhere :)


> If you don't mind, here are a few suggestions you may want to consider
> in later revisions of the document:
>
> == Mission Statement ==
>
> Instead of copying from web pages, a reformulation of GNOME's goal would
> be nice. I admit it's sort of scattered across different sites, but the
> goal in broad terms is not so complicated. Here's a suggestion:
>
>   "to provide a desktop environment and development platform for
> personal computers, as well as mobile and embedded devises, that is Free
> Software, Open Source, and usable for people all over the world." 
>
> The last one is basically a short cut for proper Usability,
> Accessibility, Internationalization and Localization.
>
> What GNOME is, is often just a secondary goal, in my opinion -- a means
> to an end. For example, there's no inherent value in being 'supported'
> unless you need to be supported to reach some other goals.
>
> (Strictly speaking, the above formulation still lacks something,
> otherwise we already reached all goals and everybody could go home right
> now. It's obviously insufficient to just 'provide' certain things.)

I totally agree that our mission statement should be revisited and
updated. 

It would be great if we have a better mission statement for the new
website. Hey marketing folks, what do you think ?. Can we start a new
threat to discuss this ?.

> == SWOT Matrix ==

> Under this definitions, you may want to reconsider some points in your
> analysis. 
>
> Some examples:
>
>   * "Free Software" is hardly an "internal, helpful condition" to
> achieve the objective(s). In fact, it's part of the objective, thus it
> can't be a strength.

Hmm, I see your point, but GNOME is free software, what we want is to
deliver this freedom to all the users. All our pieces of software are
free and we support other free software projects. You can say that we
have a free software culture or something like that.

>   * The same holds for "Good internalization support" and "Good
> Accessibility support". This is more of a status description.

Well, I have to put some things on the strengh areas for making feel us
better .... just joking :P

We have control about the i18n support and we are delivering GNOME in a
lot of languages. We have control about this and it is working
moderately well.

Windows XP have support to 19 languages, GNOME have support to many
languages, 34 languages have 90% or more of its interface translated.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/goglobal/bb688176.aspx
http://l10n.gnome.org/releases/gnome-2-30/

The same goes with a11y. I put this on the strengh part because we are
using a lot of technologies made in GNOME, like AT-SPI or Orca -with Sun
Microsystems support- for giving a11y support. We are leading a11y
support on the free desktop.

http://accessibility.kde.org/developer/comparision.php


>   * "GNOME brand is known in the FLOSS world." is more of an external,
> helpful condition.

About the GNOME brand, it is true that can be situated on other place.
This sort of strengh is to indicate that we have a brand, though I have
indicated weaknesses areas related with branding.


>   * "Aspire to be the platform of choice for opportunistic desktop
> developers." is hardly an external condition. It's, dunno, another
> secondary objective or so...

I don't think this objetive is so secondary. If someone want to do a
small program, we want that this person thinks about using GNOME for
doing that. Our users are also developers ;) 


>   * "APIs and ABIs changes no scheduled in enough advance..." is
> certainly something internal, not external, since we do the scheduling,
> no?

Distributions don't know in enough advance when we are going to commit
such changes in GNOME (we don't have rules about this). For example,
Ubuntu has Long Term Support editions, and they should know when we are
going to make big changes because releases after big changes are usually
more buggy.

Moreover, there have been some debate about cadence, and GNOME can
contribute to help on this

http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/290

Distributions are our main way to deliver our free desktop to our users,
we can make easier their job, we are helping ourselves

Best regards,

   -- Juanjo Marin