Re: [question to candidates] GNOME OS

[Ryan Lortie <desrt desrt ca>]

hi Frederic,

On Wed, 2011-05-25 at 08:24 +0200, Frederic Peters wrote: 
> 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 echo the comments from the other participants that this is not a
question for the board of directors.  The board is not qualified to make
these types of decisions.

The consensus in the community *seems* to be that GNOME OS is a
compelling idea, and I agree with that.  What's left unanswered is what
our responsibility is to people who don't buy entirely into that vision.
On one end, do we consider non-Linux systems?  On the other end, do we
consider non-gnome-shell desktops?

Personally, I lean towards inclusiveness.  I think that it's extremely
important for us to continue to focus on uses of our developer platform
that fall outside of the "GNOME OS" vision.  I think that wide use of
our developer platform is a great way of attracting new contributors to
our project.  That's just my opinion, though, and I'll say again that
this is not the sort of opinion that should be held in an official
capacity by a director of the board.

One way or another, what I do strongly believe [in an official capacity]
is that we need to come up with decisive answers to these questions and
to make our position clear.  Our downstreams suffer from our lack of
clarity and we suffer as a result of that.  This is a problem that you
and I have both heard quite a lot about.

One way or another, we need some body of individuals that is both
qualified to represent the project and willing to take on these kinds of
problems.  Maybe that means that the release team should step up.  Maybe
that means a new body should be formed.  I don't know if it should be
under the banner of "the foundation" or not (I don't even know if the
release team is considered to be part of the foundation, to be honest).
In general, I think that the current approach of
let-happen-what-will-happen is causing damage.

Thanks for the good question.