Re: GNOME now

[Benjamin Otte <otte gnome org>]

Peteris Krisjanis <pecisk <at> gmail.com> writes:

> I think we are in same business as Apple - we are trying to offer
> unified user experience. Difference between us and Apple though is that
> (in my opinion) most of us strongly believe that openness/freedom and
> consistent user experience (trough user interface and system design and
> behavior) can be in same boat (versus "Walled garden" and "guided
> experience"). I think we can all agree that's our vision.
> 
First: Watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp0HIF3SfI4 so you know what I'm
going to reference.

What you say is not a vision. That's a "what", not a "why". Also, are we in the
same business as Apple? Apple is in the business of challenging the status quo
and thinking differently. ($:04 in the video) Are we? WHY are we doing GNOME?


The second thing is one that has been nagging me since I've started working on
GTK. I talked about in my talk at Berlin in 2011. And so far, nobody has
provided a good answer for it: We are not answering some of the most basic
questions you need to answer for any product about how we are doing it. Like
these:

Who are we doing it for?

Well, we sometimes say it's for "everyone", but that's just not true. If it was
for everyone, we wouldn't require OpenGL and spend our time on bringing GNOME 2
to mobile phones instead of reinventing the one thing we were good at (the Linux
desktop).
But even if we were for everyone, we have to have some people we like more than
others. We already picked people that don't want to fiddle with their
configuration over people that do want to fiddle with their configuration. We've
also been picking people that need simple consumer applications over content
creators. Or we wouldn't have written contacts, clocks and a new shell, but
would have worked on improving GIMP, Inkscape, Glade or Pitivi instead. And it
looks like Wacom users with lots of VMs that require Kerberos logins are way

Who are we selling it to?

This question is not about the person who is going to use it in the end. It's
about who is taking what we produce and doing stuff with those things we gave
out. Apple for example doesn't just sell to users, it also sells to shops and to
mobile network operators. And Android is sold to OEMs.
So who are we trying to convince to use GNOME? Is it distros? Is it OEMs? Is it
end users? All of them?
Because if it's distros, we've lost a bunch with the GNOME 3 transition (Ubuntu,
Meego/Tizen) and I don't see us trying to win them back. If it's OEMs, we
haven't done much better. If it's end users, then why don't we have a product
for them? The only product we have that targets end users directly is jhbuild...

So HOW are we actually doing this?


So that leaves the what question. It's a question most people aren't sure about
either. Are we doing a desktop? A tablet interface? Maybe phones? Are we for
kiosks? Do we ship a platform for others to build upon? All of it? We do have a
bunch of guidelines (unified experience, HiG etc) that you outline, but from my
POV we are clearly missing answers to a lot of these questions.

And these questions are important for me as a GTK developer to answer. in the
recent theming discussion - where theme developers complain that GTK breaks
their themes every release - I need to know what to do about it and what to
spend my time on. Do I make their lives easier? Or do I instead work on new
features desired for GNOME 3.8? Do I look more or less at GTK portability to
other platforms (like Windows, OSX, or even running on top of KDE or Unity)?
Should I take time looking into porting Libreoffice to GTK? Should I improve
devtools like Glade instead of GTK? 
I can roughly answer all of these questions myself. But I have no idea WHAT we
as the GNOME community think is important.


Benjamin


PS: Another example for the why/how/what thing:
Mozilla believes in an open web. They educate about and develop software to make
this open experience easy. Wanna use their browser and phone?