Re: [question to candidates] GNOME OS

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Wed, 2011-05-25 at 08:24 +0200, Frederic Peters wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> GNOME OS has been mentioned and questioned repeatedly in recent
> discussions on desktop-devel-list, about its definition itself[1],
> and the changing (or not?) role of the GNOME project with regards
> to distributions (based or not on the Linux kernel).
> 
> What are your thougths on this?[2] Do you think this is a foundation
> job to answer those questions? If not, is this a responsibility of the
> release team? Or something that is best left unanswered, as pieces are
> put into positions by different persons?

I don't think it's the board's job to decide, but I do think
the tendency of the community right now is to integrate more
deeply with the system, rather than bolt things on top of a
multitude of platforms we don't control.

This is going to raise technical questions. How much will we
dictate software, versus dictating features and interfaces?
Do we want to get into the business of distribution, or are
we happy to let others deal with that?

It's also going to raise branding and marketing questions.
If we see GNOME appearing on non-PC devices, do we want them
presented as GNOME devices, or are we happy to be a footnote?

I don't have those answers, and it's up to the community to
make those decisions.

But if we do want to push a complete software stack, and we
want to push GNOME as the OS for devices, then we need to
look at getting GNOME onto devices. We need to get device
vendors on board, working upstream, and helping us decide
how to best adapt GNOME to their hardware (or adapt their
hardware to our designs).

This is something I'd like to work on if elected.

--
Shaun