Re: Reboot: Strategic goals for GNOME

[Liam R E Quin <liam holoweb net>]

On Thu, 2010-03-04 at 17:45 -0800, Lefty (石鏡 ) wrote:
> On 3/4/10 3:00 PM, "Richard Stallman" <rms gnu org> wrote:
> >
> > Let's not be in a rush to invite users to use servers -- even our own
> > -- instead of their own computers.  That is the wrong direction to go.
[...]

> I doubt that as many as 10% of the people who maintain a blog or share
> pictures on Flickr or Picasa could do it if they had to run their own server
> to support those activities, and it seems unreasonable to suggest that they
> should.

What could GNOME do to change that?

Maybe we need a peer-to-peer distributed blogging system, for example?
"Publish my content on the GNOME cloud, without losing my own copy of
it and without losing ownership of it"...

> In any case, I'm under the impression that a search warrant or similar order
> is generally required in the US to get information regardless of whether
> it's from a hosted service or from your personal computer; certainly the
> police can't simply call up Facebook and ask for information on random
> people and expect to get it.
They can and they do, as has been widely covered by the media.

> The vast majority of people who use computers--and I'm not referring to
> people who download source and build their own versions of things--are quite
> happy to, for example, have Wordpress or Livejournal maintain their blogs
> for them, and there's absolutely no reason for them to attempt to host it
> themselves.

They are also happy to use Microsoft Word, and other proprietary
software. But that does not mean we should abandon GNOME.
Instead, we need to make it easier for people to follow the more
open path.

Liam

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org