Re: What is GNOME office?

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Lauris Kaplinski <lauris helixcode com> writes: 
> Seems that many guys have forgotten - OK, after all many of us are already
> hired to work on Gnome - that one of the main goals of free software is
> joy of programming and good community. And in that respect many otherwise
> identical projects certainly are not interchangeable.
> So saying to Project A developers, that A will not be 'official gnome'
> program will in no ways encourage those people to work on Project B. And if
> the opinion of foundation will eventually drive Project A out of business
> (due to the decreasing interest of outside developers) they will most
> probably leave gnome development completely (landing in the camps of KDE
> or whatever.)
> And Gnome certainly will not become stronger from that...
> Keep (all) developers happy - or Gnome will lose its position as quickly,
> as it gained it (remember year 1998?)
> 

I do agree, but I don't think we can give up the technical quality of
GNOME and the long-term success of free software in the
process. There's certainly some tension there, and a fine balance to
maintain.

I don't know - I've always been in it to make free software
succeed. Personally I would not be involved in a project that was just
a hobby that had no chance of having many users and didn't want to get
more users. To me it's a lot more fun knowing that I'm working for a
reason and that my work will be important.

I realize not everyone shares that view, and there's nothing wrong
with that - I don't expect them too, and it's totally legitimate to be
involved in GNOME just because it's a fun thing to do in the
here-and-now. However I do think there's another perspective that
maybe people besides me share, that the reason to be involved is to
achieve some big, cool things and really make a difference. For me
that's the reason it's fun.

Which makes things more complicated - the thing that would make _me_
upset and unmotivated is for GNOME to be just a hacker toy with no
real-world impact. Other people are likely to lose interest if
real-world impact and long term goals become too high priority.

i.e. just doing everything all the hackers want doesn't work if
different hackers want things that are mutually exclusive. So we
should face that there is possibly an unresolvable tension at the
heart of this and someone is bound to get upset whatever we decide to
do.

It's a fine balance, who can say what the right answer is. I think we
have to just do our best to discuss things and come up with some
solution.

At all costs we have to avoid paranoia about people's motivations. I
hope everyone will stick to discussing facts and technical issues, in
order to ensure we remain open-minded and willing to cooperate with
each other. We have to constantly keep in mind that everyone shares
the goal of making GNOME truly excellent. That's the key point in
maintaining the quality of the community I'd say.

Havoc