Re: [question to candidates] GNOME OS

[Andre Klapper <ak-47 gmx net>]

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?


To me the term "GNOME OS" has both a technical and a marketing aspect
which are of course linked to each other.
I consider the technical one rather a release-team topic while the
marketing one is something to be handled by the marketing team and/or
the board.

On a marketing level, it is about strengthening the brand "GNOME"
towards existing and potential customers which are currently
distributions.

Technically, "GNOME OS" seems to imply pushing for a higher level of
standardization and integration with Linux platforms which might lead to
increased adaption of our stack, with the backlash for other (less
spread) Unix-based platforms to potentially have more work to integrate
GNOME.
However I consider this to be the reality already with most GNOME
developers using Linux, hence no radical change here.

GNOME should be welcoming to contributions making parts of the GNOME
stack that are either focused on Linux or Linux-only also support other
platforms.
If this is not feasible because of highly increased code complexity
(which seems to be a likely case e.g. for systemd) these parts of the
stack must at least define and provide stable interfaces for potential
implementations on non-Linux platforms and should welcome especially
non-Linux platform developers to get involved in discussions on API
introductions/changes for such projects.

Currently I don't see anything to "decide" for the board or the release
team on the topic "GNOME OS" since its definition is vague.

Plus I am not convinced that the term "GNOME OS" instead of "GNOME"
helps us pushing our technology, especially after the moduleset
redefinition that clarified what the GNOME Core is in combination with
the increased freedom on the application level (Let the market and its
users decide on the latter level).

andre
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