Re: Minutes of the board meeting of March 30, 2020

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Wed, May 27, 2020 at 7:31 AM philip.chimento--- via
foundation-announce <foundation-announce gnome org> wrote:

>  * Foundation mission/vision
>    * Allan: I would like to get an idea of the direction of travel for this, and a working group will work 
> on it. The main question is what we think is most important: user share of GNOME desktops? Or our influence 
> as a project, impact on the software industry and wider world?

>    * Britt: I'm in favour of the influence side, as it's a truer representation of what the GNOME community 
> today is. We don't contribute to GNOME because we want user share, we do it because we want to make the 
> best software possible. However, correctly or incorrectly, a common perception of GNOME is that we force 
> our ideas onto users. We should either embrace that or avoid it altogether, but not in between. Currently 
> it seems like we walk a line where we don't say it but we do do it. I think either the mission statement 
> should be neutral, or embrace this perception.
>    * Federico: I think we should focus on the first approach (increasing adoption), since the second one 
> (influencing the software industry) is more or less already the status quo.  Users' freedoms are being 
> eroded all the time through proprietary and/or privacy-violating software. We need to give them an obvious 
> choice. It is easier for people to switch individual apps to free software gradually 
> (GIMP/Inkscape/whatever on Windows) than to make the big jump to Linux systems. And yet we make very little 
> effort to make our apps available on those systems. They are available by default on Linux, or with 
> relatively little work, but making them available on Windows/Mac is always dodgy.

Stay tuned next week for the next episode as we continue the
conversation next week. :-) Of course, I have no idea if this
conversation is resolved or not - but given we are talking about the
general approach to what GNOME wants to do in terms of a mission
statement - I thought I would throw in my 2 cents and maybe encourage
discussion here by foundation members in hopes that it becomes more
clearer which direction to lean towards.

I think it's worth considering learning towards influence - leading
with technical achievements, flawless design, and a passionate
community. Influence comes because people want to be part of those
three. The larger your community grows and participates the better
your project comes and that itself will lead to user expansion
organically.

But that influence needs to come with a solid sense that we need to
interop with the rest of  the open source communities that are out
there - the role of open source and even open hardware is expanding in
our daily lives. But the last mile is still proprietary (the interface
to your personal computing) but we'll get there - but I think it is
more important that we participate in other communities and not just
look internally. If we build bridges to them they will build bridges
with us and even possibly use our software instead of the proprietary
desktop they use today.

t;dir - the mission statement should encourage building on what we do,
with the community we have, and work with others as much as possible.

Best,
sri