Re: What are our goals? (was: Re: [Fwd: Re: New supporter] )

[Dave Neary <dneary free fr>]

Hi,

Selon Thilo Pfennig <tp alternativ net>:

> I would say: make the best Desktop available. Be better than the others.
> Do we have a concrete audience?

Public sector. Free software has a lot to offer here, and GNOME is well placed
for the market.

ISVs. Get people building software on our stack, contributing to the ecosystem.

Windows users. Get great GTK+/GNOME apps built for Win32 installed on computers,
and lower the barrier from moving to 100% GNOME.

> Why are we using GNOME instead of X,Y,Z?

Easy to learn, easy to use. Power without complication. Simplicity without
compromise. Doesn't get in the way.

> What is GNOME btw?

Above all else, GNOME is the community. Then, GNOME is the platform - the
ability to integrate and interoperate transparently between applications
developed coherently in parallel (a shared technical vision to go with our
shared cultural vision).

> What if I use the GNOME desktop and a non-GNOME (KDE)
> application? Am I a GNOME user or a KDE user?

GNOME.

> And if I would use KDE and use GNOME-applications?

KDE. But a little bit GNOME too :)

> So: What is a GNOME user?

It's not black & white (except sometimes it is). A Linux or Unix user who
chooses GNOME as his desktop environment is a GNOME user. A Windows user who is
using the GIMP, Inkscape, GAIM, XChat, Abiword and a bunch of other GTK+ or
GNOME based applications is a GNOME user tryoing to escape from Windows. A KDE
user who runs a couple of GTK+ applications is a KDE user who runs a couple of
GTK+ applications.

> What importance does freedesktop has for GNOME?

Vital. GNOME developers wouldn't be working on freedesktop standards (and
creating freedesktop in the first place) if we didn't think that defining
interfaces to allow interoperability wasn't important. We want the user to be
able to start a KDE application, cut & paste from a GNOME app and have that
Just Work. We want printing, help, docs and other subsystems shared so that you
can read your GNOME help in Konq, or print a document from KWord and Abiword on
the same machine. This is a no-brainer.

> If we want to reach a
> goal like 10x10 would this mean to reach that goals by all means
> necessary (even harm KDE?)?

No. Although reaching 10% of the globval desktop market will inevitably put us
into conflict with KDE at some stage, I'd like to believe that it will stay at
friendly rivalry.

> What is the current situation with OpenOffice.org?

OpenOffice.org is currently a 3rd party application using the GNOME framework
for at least some builds (the Ximian OO.o GNOME builds). It is currently the
best available office suite, and integrates pretty well with GNOME.

> I got a very mixes
> picture. On the one hand there is the Gnome-Office project which consist
> of Abiword and Gnumeric (right?).

And GNOME-DB, yeah.

> On the other hand Openoffice.org is
> not GNOME but is somehow an important part in argumentation, but not
> really loved  by GNOME people?

That's right. It's an essential part of any switch argument, but isn't really a
GNOME program (in philosophy or community). There are people who work on both
(Michael Meeks is a long-time GNOME contributor). But it's fair to say that
GNOME developers consider OOo to be outside the GNOME sphere. Whereas Abiword
and GNUMeric are very much inside that sphere. I see no ambiguity in saying
"there's a credible competitor to the leading office suite, and it integrates
well with GNOME" on the one hand, and saying "Here's some great GNOME office
software" on the other.

> Same with Mozilla. Mozilla is somehow
> essential and there is cooperation, but the goals are ver different.
> There are some nasty bugs that are quite annoying in the GNOME defautl
> browser Epiphany that the Mozilla people do not fix, as they have
> workarounds in their applications. Ubuntu and Fedora choose Firefox as
> their default browser. This was a major set back in my eyes -a nd I
> really did not understand why the GNOME default browser was not default
> on the GNOME Live-CD.

Because we started on Ubuntu.

Look, don't over-analyse the Mozilla thing. the Mozilla foundation see
themselves as a mass-market 3rd party software package now. That's where they
want to be, and they have good momentum. Statistics like percentage of the
browser market are important to them. The Linux distributions want to be able
to say "We ship with Firefox!" because firefox is a well-known free software
package. That's a business decision, not a technology decision.

> For marketing I think these mixed messages are poison.

Not really. Don't over-dramatise things which are only known and important in
our own little world. As you said earlier, most users don't care about issues
like OOo and Firefox. Both use GTK+ as their toolkit on Linux, and are
essential items in the list of bullet points that you give people when they ask
"what software can I have on Linux?" - they're not GNOME, but they're part of
the typical GNOME desktop.

> Maybe there should be more
> talk from GNOME marketing to Mozilla marketing if developers from both
> sides do not find together.

What makes you think there isn't?

Cheers,
Dave.

--
Dave Neary
Lyon, France