Re: Goal for GNOME Mobile?

[Ben Leslie <benno ok-labs com>]

On Wed Nov 19, 2008 at 15:41:30 +0100, Dave Neary wrote:
>Hi Ben,
>
>Ben Leslie wrote:
<snip>
>> Anyway, if I had to come up with the 'GNOME Mobile vision' it would
>> be something along the lines of:
>> 
>> 'GNOME Mobile is a set of GNOME and related open-source technologies
>> that have been optimised for mobile and embedded devices'
>
>Disagree with this. I would definitely not say that GNOME Mobile is
>specifically optimised for mobile & embedded. The whole point is to take
>*standard desktop components* and use them in mobile.
>
>We are, as you say, optimising those components for mobile (or we should
>be), but we're not making "GTK+ mobile/embedded edition", and I don't
>think it would be desirable to do that.

Agree with you here. My wording was imprecise.

>> I would follow up with something a FAQ along the lines of:
>
><snip>
>
>I like the FAQ idea, and mostly agree with what's in it. One thing which
>is still missing from this all is the call to action. The stuff that
>needs to get done for mobile through GNOME Mobile.
>
>I'm going to kill the analogy completely, but bear with me...

<snip>

I agree with the analogy (I've used an extremely similar one before!).

>In the corporate world, this typically happens by setting up a
>non-profit or university research department where everyone is a member
>or benefactor and pays a lot of money every year, and that body then
>hires the people to do the work. That doesn't map easily onto our
>problem space of distributed community development, but perhaps we need
>to think of some way to structure investment in the GNOME platform that
>does make sense to our community?

I guess finding out the way to do that is the difficult thing. To me
it appears that the house-building companies are contributing directly
by providing patches/project towards GNOME mobile, rather than a
direct monetary investment.

Cheers,

Benno