GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap

[Juanjo Marin <juanjomarin96 yahoo es>]

Hi there,

I'm writing in order to share my concerns about the lack of strategic
roadmap on GNOME. So far, GNOME is doing pretty well with the 6-month
cycle. It's added stability into GNOME. Yes, GNOME is rock solid !. We
can feel proud of that. However,though every subproject has his own
roadmap, IMHO, in the big picture, GNOME lacks of direction.

The only sort of real recent strategical movement is GNOME 3.0. I think
our community has to keep the stability, but from time to time we need
to stop and think we are we going. Some questions that arise to my mind
when I think if GNOME is going in the right directions are:

* GTK is losing popularity. It is perceived by a lot of people as old
and difficult. I think we need any kind of action on this area because
is a cornerstone issue. Less programmers means less applications and
contributions. We need to care of our platform users in the same way we
care of our desktop users. Some people has pointed this in the past, eg
[1]

* Corporate free desktop keeps as an unexplored field. Can GNOME be the
first to conquer this wild land?. Nobody seems to care about this. The
only step on this direction I know is APOC [2]

* It seems we have lost the mobile battle. Can we do something about it
or simply retreat?. I like the idea of creating more components and some
of this components can be added to the GNOME mobile platform.

Of course, these are only some examples of directions we can take. The
point is that if we agree to some kind of direction then we can focus
our resources on that direction.

Just my 2 cents,

   -- Juanjo Marín

[1]
http://live.gnome.org/GUADEC/2008/Slides?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=marketing_gtk_Guadec2008.pdf
[2] http://apoc.freedesktop.org/wiki/
[3] http://blog.tomeuvizoso.net/2010/01/one-more-opportunistic-dot.html