Some thoughts on the future of gnome

[alan <root variant me uk>]

Hi all!

This is my first post to the ml so please go easy on me :) (I hope its
the right list, I sent to a couple of other ones but this seems to be
the best bet!)

I was just thinking about gnome and how to make it more widespread and I
realised that the windows vista release is an ideal opportunity for
gnome to get noticed by the wider public.

First of all, is it likely that a windows version of gnome (even a
basic, light version) will be available when vista is released? The way
I see it is this, people will look at the vista advertising and see all
these cool features that it supposedly offers them but they will also
notice the price and the fact that their old 2GHz system just doesn't
cut it so they have to upgrade that too! What better time to have a huge
publicity drive which shows people "Look! we can give you all this, AND
all this other cool stuff, on your existing windows
computer without the need for expensive hardware upgrades! And guess
what? It's FREE!! (As in Freedom and as in beer)" I'm not talking about
this in a "how can we beat windows" kind of way, more of a "what
opportunities exist for popularising of gnome" and if you ask me, the
vista launch is an _excellent_ window of opportunity 

All the publicity wont matter if gnome isn't able to do "all this"
though so perhaps we should have a bit of a recruitment drive right now
and find people with the time to tackle some of the bigger tasks
(porting, new applications etc). 

I know most of this is already covered in the
road-map etc but I just want to tell people what I would like to see
happen! I'm learning mono c# at the moment so I may even be able to
help in a few months.

variant