Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap

[Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>]

Hi,

Juanjo Marin wrote:
> Possibly Alberto is right. Anyway, the original message of this thread
> is that GNOME doesn't have long term goals. It seems that the
> improvement of GTK attact a lot of attention. 

Proposed short-to-mid-term goal: Make the GNOME platform exciting to
alpha-dog application developers & thought leaders.

Proposed community mantra: Beautiful computing freedom

Proposed project vision: Hidden in plain sight: Everyone using GNOME,
no-one noticing


The thing about a vision (which is missing here) is that it easily makes
it easier for you to choose the right path at the fork in the road.

Think of the vision of the Palm Pilot as a great example - easy to
remember, and informs every decision: "Fits in a shirt pocket, syncs
seamlessly with PC, fast and easy to use, no more than $299".

What functionality is crucial? Seamless sync. Do we need to include a
certain component? What's its effect on the BOM? Can we still retail at
$299? Effect on size? Will it still fit in a shirt pocket? If not, no.

The hidden in plain sight vision has an element of that, but then it
doesn't provide any "use" vision, which is the biggest part of the
problem we have on the user interface.


Are we a middleware & platform project? Or do we still produce
compelling user interfaces? If so, for whom, in what circumstances?

We probably could have had moblin be "GNOME Netbook". We probably could
have had Maemo be "GNOME Smartphone". Or Sugar be "GNOME Education".

We probably could have had MeeGo be "GNOME Mobile", but the project
wasn't the obvious place to go, because we don't seem to know what we're
providing any more. And so we're losing stewardship (and control) of
these great GNOME-related projects to the Linux Foundation, or to Intel
& Nokia, or to the distributions.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
dneary gnome org