Re: Marketing Minutes December 13, 2012

[Dave Neary <dneary gnome org>]

Hi,

Sorry I couldn't attend - a sick son & bedtime meant that 8pm yesterday 
was rush hour in the Neary household.
On 12/14/2012 03:24 PM, Emily Gonyer wrote:
> Sri: Theres a common wisdom that GNOME will throw out features and are
> unfriendly. We've let others tell our story for us. As a result, most
> of the press we receive is negative, focusing on GNOME 3's failures
> and shortcomings.
>
> Andreas: Whats the biggest drawback of this perception?
I would say that the biggest draw-back of this perception is that we are 
not growing as a developer community, because we're seen as a 
conservative project where code is as likely to be rejected as accepted 
once the work is done, it's not clear how to get pre-approval before 
developing something that it'll be accepted.
We have also had a couple of examples of new applications being built 
which compete with existing apps, and the process for choosing has been 
unclear - Photos & Shotwell comes to mind, as do Files and Zeitgeist. I 
think this is also hurting the GNOME ISV community (such as it is).
In addition, the reputation of GNOME as a conservative project is worse 
in the platform, with the result that we have few developers working on 
the foundations of the project at this point.
I don't have any good answers to how to turn this around, but it seems 
to me that these are the biggest costs of the reputation - because if we 
don't figure out how to grow our developer community, the rest doesn't 
matter.
Cheers,
Dave.

--
Dave Neary, Lyon, France
Email: dneary gnome org
Jabber: nearyd gmail com