Re: GNOME OS Goals

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

Stormy Peters <stormy gnome org> wrote:
> William Jon McCann <william jon mccann gmail com> wrote:
>> Why?
>>
> To get people involved, to get downstream partners (distros? hardware
> vendors? who?) involved, to get users to use it, to get funding for
> hackfests, ...

I might not have expressed myself clearly when I tried to explain this
before. I think it is a bit early to be getting a wider audience
involved, or to seek support from partners. Many of the things that
have been discussed as a part of GNOME OS have yet to happen (I'm
mainly thinking about the application deployment and sandboxing story
here). These goals require the involvement of a small number of
experts - specific individuals who can design and begin to implement
the technical solutions we need. Until that happens, getting wider
support isn't going to be very useful.

There might be other GNOME OS goals where additional support would be
helpful. Improved touch input support is one of these. Consolidating
the core UX and completing our planned set of core applications is
another. It would obviously be great if we can get more hackers
working on these tasks.

"GNOME OS" isn't a particularly useful concept when it comes to
getting support for these areas though. We don't need it to say "an
improved set of core applications would be beneficial" or "touch
support would make GNOME compatibility with the new breed of hybrid
devices".

> If I don't understand what we are doing and why, then not only will I
> probably be less involved, but I'll be much less likely to be able to know
> who to approach about shipping GNOME or who to approach about funding GNOME.
> I'll have no way to explain to my friends and family why they or their
> companies should use GNOME. If that's not a problem, I can stop now and go
> work on something else.
>
> I'm sure you have a vision. But all I'm getting is, we are working on making
> GNOME more application developer friendly, beautiful and user friendly. In
> an open source development environment. That doesn't paint a picture of a
> better world. It doesn't make me feel like I must have GNOME. It doesn't
> tell me what GNOME is going to be.
>
> However, if nobody else chimes in, then maybe I'm the one that doesn't get
> it and I'll just step back and wait to see the magic happen.

These "why" questions are important, and I think you know that I
seriously want to come up with some effective messaging here. Those
goals - how we want to make the world a better place - should apply to
the whole of the GNOME project though, not just the GNOME OS
initiative.

Allan