What is GNOME?

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Hi,

To define "contributing to GNOME" and determine what projects are in
the foundation, we're going to have to define the set of projects that
GNOME contains.

I see only a few real alternatives:
 - accept any and all projects that want to be in GNOME
 - say that GNOME is only the desktop environment that's always
   running (panel, etc.) and the development libs; exclude 
   _all_ applications
 - say that the board just adds and removes projects as it sees fit
 - try to define some subjective criteria for projects

The subjective criteria might be:
 - breadth of interest; for example, office apps and the file manager 
   are used by everyone, molecular visualization is not
 - best-of-breed; we only pick the one most promising newsreader
   project (I dislike this one a lot; it discourages duplication of 
   effort, which is actually bad, because it's hard to predict 
   which project will succeed, and you lose fault tolerance)
 - consistency with the GNOME vision; for example, no 3D user interfaces
   written direct to GGI, no clones of my-favorite-historical-UI.
 - project fills an important gap or need
 
I guess the most sensible thing to me is either to say we exclude all
apps, or to have a set of subjective guidelines for which projects we
include and have the board make the call on each project.

For the _initial_ set of projects, used to create the _initial_ list
of members, maybe we could select a conservative group of projects
everyone can agree on, rather than trying to get an exhaustive
list. Then the resulting membership will be able to add more gray-area
projects using the process we'll describe in the bylaws. That way we
avoid endless debate on this list about the initial project set.

Which method of defining GNOME do people like? What are the criteria
for making a project part of GNOME?

Havoc