Re: Reboot: Strategic goals for GNOME

[Richard Stallman <rms gnu org>]

    The combination of technologies going under the name "HTML 5" have 
    made/are making web technology based applications finally competitive 
    with those built using conventional toolkits such as Qt, GTK+, and the 
    Windows and Mac equivalents.

If everything gets done inside or through your browser, it would make
toolkits such as GTK and desktop environments such as GNOME obsolete,
except as platforms for a browser.

"Web technology based application" is a very broad term.  It can
include applications that are installed into a browser (they can be
nonfree; see http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html), and
it can include servers.  But if the server substitutes for a program
you could run on your own machine, that makes it Software as a
Service, which is equivalent to proprietary software.

It is a bad idea to replace a program you can explicitly install on
your own machine -- and which you can therefore also decide not to
install -- with a program that either gets installed implicitly or
remains on a server outside your control.  Perhaps highlighting that
will show people why they should continue to install and run local
applications, which would then use GNOME.