Re: GNOME now

[Stormy Peters <stormy peters gmail com>]

I enjoyed reading everyone's responses.

And while I agree with Jason that a mailing list is not the best way to reach a proposal and consensus, I do think it's really important for us to have this discussion as a project and for everyone to be able to follow along.

I just have a few thoughts I'd like to add to the discussion.

* Several people said our goal is to be "a free and open source desktop". For years our goal was for GNOME to be a free and open source desktop. And we have done that. It's time to define what's next.

* The desktop market is not growing. We can continue to define ourselves as a desktop but that's not a growing market. I'm not talking about Linux versus Windows, I'm talking about desktop vs mobile. The average computer user in the developing world uses a smartphone for many of the things they would have used a desktop for. And they are buying more and more tablets. In the developing world, many are skipping desktop computers all together, and their first technology experience is with a mobile phone. To continue to make a difference in the world, I think we need to move to mobile. And we need to make that obvious to potential partners. In spite of a lot of work going on in the GNOME mobile/tablet space, right now most people see as a Linux desktop.

* Competitors. We need to pick our competitors to help sell our story. If we don't pick our competition, others will decide for us what it is. This isn't about giving up our ideals of cooperating and building on others' work but more about helping people understand what we do. By competing with KDE, we made our space the Linux desktop. If KDE hadn't existed, Linux users most likely never would have understood what GNOME was. They would have just used "Linux". (While I have argued in the past that we should have competed with Windows, not KDE, I do think having a smaller defined space enabled GNOME to win in that space. However, it did not help the Linux desktop compete against Windows as much as it could have.)

* Redefining ourselves is scary and hard. If we decide to choose a new vision, we should know that it's hard work, it's likely to generate lots of difficult conversations and we may lose a few people along the way. 

Stormy