Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap

[Philip Van Hoof <pvanhoof gnome org>]

On Mon, 2010-02-22 at 20:27 +0100, Dave Neary wrote:

> Juanjo Marin wrote:
> > * 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]
> 
> Perhaps the fact that GTK+ is seen as a cornerstone issue is a
> cornerstone issue... there's no specific reason why GTK+, FLTK or EFL
> would do the job just as well of providing a toolkit.

I agree.

> What's important to GNOME is the vision and the philosophy of open
> access, but that vision has somehow lost the hustle that comes from
> homesteading.

I'm going to decline from commenting much on philosophy this time. Mine
is probably known, and people must be (really) tired of listening to it.

After talking with some of the doers at our conferences, at FOSDEM too,
I believe our doers have a pragmatic, not a puristic philosophy.

That's why I made my earlier comment that our community itself isn't
negative or hostile towards commercial mobile ecosystems.

> > * 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.
> 
> Have we lost the mobile battle? It certainly appears that GTK+ has lost
> the mobile battle, but all of the hard work that GNOME hackers have put
> into the middleware platform and components like Gstreamer, Dbus,
> Telepathy and Pulseaudio are now cornerstone parts of both the free
> desktop and the mobile platform.

In mobile we're doing pretty well at the middleware segment.

But indeed ...

> I would agree that the GNOME GUI platform is not exciting application
> developers right now, and that's something we need to fix. And it's not
> an easy problem.

I think that's a self inflected problem. Because for years wasn't Gtk+
(the toolkit) being innovated on. Instead is the focus 'stability'. 

Regretfully we see the same thing in most of the original core
components: the focus isn't innovation. We're not leading.

We are seeing a lot of innovation in middleware, though. I am very, very
pleased that the GUADEC organizers have put a focus on metadata in their
call for papers.


Cheers,


Philip

-- 
Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer
home: me at pvanhoof dot be 
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org 
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