On Wed, 2010-02-17 at 08:09 -0800, Sriram Ramkrishna wrote:
On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 1:27 PM, Nelson Marques <07721 ipam pt> wrote:
Please flame at will...
I would hope that nobody would do such a thing for putting effort and
time into an idea. We have serious community issues if one expects to
be flamed when proposing an idea. This isn't LKML. :)
That said, I haven't looked at the attached docs, but I do like the
idea of ecological friendliness and naming releases after endangered
animals is a splendid idea. O'Reilly did something similar with the
cover of their books although the animals weren't endangered and
interestingly enough I remember the covers as well as the title
sometimes the cover before the title.
sri
It's not a big idea as it's already for ages with GNU/Linux distributions, by Apple, etc. The point is actually not to do it randomly, but transmitting to the audience that we care about this. This will also open a window for further participation on forthcoming releases. I used the Lynx because it's something that I know, but we'll need more endangered species for next releases if this is a go, so providing new ideas for endangered species to use is also good. I do believe it's reliable to do this and that it will surprise a lot of people, and we will cut the "copy cat" issues by fundamenting the idea with something that really no one can point fingers. I also thought that this might be a good campaign to launch further challenges to the community. I'll give a practical example. I "gear up" my desktop on DeviantART (around 3000 GTK themes/engines), Emerald themes etc... For the GTK Themes I do install them by unpacking them into the .themes folder. People who are arriving to GNOME will install very few themes using the theme installer because the themes provided don't comply and are missing files required by the installer. This is a point that people not so technical might prefer to swap to KDE for instance. Through this we can launch a campaign for artists to make a theme about endangered species and submit it. We have to do it according to our rules, and that comes with full compliant themes. We already have documentation on that. We can get people who participate to be connected to GNOME if we distribute their themes on the release. I don't know how distributions like Fedora, openSuSE, Ubuntu, etc stand when distributing GNOME, but we can ask for their support and distribute this packages (themes/artwork). We can provide wallpapers made by contributors using the donated images through art.gnome.org as we can also distribute them through the organizations who will cooperate with us (ex: SOS Lynx) and of course promote GNOME at zero cost through another channels. I believe this is a good way to expand not only GNOME philosophy and Free Software, but also to attempt to get more people commited to GNOME. I wouldn't expect we have full themes supporting Metacity, Emerald, GTK, icon sets etc... but I would recon that many people would most likely be willing to provide art and become interested in GNOME. A reliable campaign like this could even allow us to offer challenges to schools, remember that distributing themes donated on official releases it's also a great victory for artists who get their work distributed around for millions of users. If this is not appealing, we might need to think on something else, but it's a start. Doesn't require resources from the GNOME Community, won't endangered other projects, so I see it as a win situation. About the flames, the important is that everyone can provide ideas and debate. I'm interested on everyone's point of view. Besides "flaming" and "flames" are words that call for people's attention ;) NM
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