Re: Two Questions for the Board Candidates

[Lionel Dricot <lionel dricot lanedo com>]

Le jeudi 26 mai 2011 à 10:38 -0700, Lefty a écrit :
> First: Since the issue of "divisive attitude[s] such as Richard
> sometimes seems to [promote?] when he talks about 'GNU/Linux'" came
> up, I'd be interested to know what, if anything, candidates for the
> Board propose to do to address the ongoing waste of time and energy in
> the community over trivia like "Linux" versus "GNU/Linux", "free"
> versus "open source", and the like. This extends to things like
> "litmus tests" on mailing lists derailing discussions into
> observations about which email clients or operating systems
> participants might be using at the time they post, for example.
> 
> Attempts to divide the community and delegitimize individuals and
> their viewpoints are common, and becoming increasingly so in the past
> few years. Bad feelings have driven many away from the level of
> involvement in the community they've previously had. Do candidates see
> this as a problem? Do they have any proposals for addressing it?


If I'm elected, I will ensure that the GNOME foundation sell popcorn and
maybe some VIP seats for those who want to watch such fights. This will
be a fun way to raise funds. :-)


> Second: Do candidates have any view as to how the disastrous attempts
> at engagement by GNOME with the mobile space might be improved on? The
> "GNOME Mobile and Embedded Initiative" went nowhere, and arguably
> handed the mobile device space to Google and Android by forfeit. Since
> that time, there have been various attempts to get community-based,
> mainstream open source onto mobile devices, all of which have pretty
> much died. The sole remaining effort seems to be MeeGo, and GNOME has
> no apparent direct involvement there.
> 
> Do candidates have any thoughts on the future of GNOME with respect to
> the mobile space? It's the fastest-growing portion of the general
> computing device market, and the main platform choices are proprietary
> or as good as. One of the issues raised by Canonical with respect to
> the GNOME 3 shell for Ubuntu was that it wasn't felt to be as
> appropriate for tablets and the like as Unity...

You raise a very good point. The GNOME Mobile initiative isn't exactly
what I would call a success. I think that the reasons are:
- Lack of product (There was no way to simply download GNOME mobile and
start developing for it)
- Lack of market vision (who was behind GNOME mobile? Was there any
support for it? Who was the intended customers?)

I have some background in the automotive industry and I can say that
GNOME mobile was seriously considered by some car makers but was not
adopted because of those two points.

I think that this is part of my broader vision to address that. By
involving more the GNOME companies, it will promote GNOME as a more
professional platform. I also secretly hope to improve the collaboration
between all the GNOME companies. This could help to address the
aforementioned issues.

I'm definitely seeing huge opportunities for a well defined GNOME mobile
platform and I believe that the board should support that.

Lionel