About you: 1. Please describe your background a little bit, i.e. what are you working on that made you interested in Gnome/mobile? If it helps us understand your background, who are you working for? I first got involved with mobile Linux when I joined OpenedHand as the first employee, contracting for Nokia on what turned into the Nokia 770, N800 and N810. Last September OpenedHand was acquired by Intel, and now I'm working on Moblin. I'm also the release manager for the GNOME Mobile moduleset, although in that respect I've been slacking rather badly of late. I hope to find the time to pull together a 2.28 release alongside the Desktop. When you first heard of Gnome/mobile: 2. What did you think it to be? Please be as frank as possible - what were your really *first* thoughts? OpenedHand was a founder member of Gnome Mobile and I was at the first meeting in Bostom, so what I think is probably different to what relative new members think. To me Gnome Mobile is a common area where companies and projects working on embedded/mobile Linux and GNOME can get together to discuss problems, share work, and plan future effort as a focused team. 3. What did you expect from it? What did you hope to see as a result from it? I hoped to see faster patch upstreaming and more co-operation, with upstream and together. 4. Why did you join the group? Do you feel like a "member" at all? If not, why not? I joined because we felt that the mobile Linux landscape was getting too fragmented, even if you only looked at devices which were ~Gnome based. 5. Did it match your expectations? If not, why? If yes, how? Not entirely. I think as a whole we're better at working with upstream more, thanks to the success of devices like the Nokia tablets and demonstrating that mobile/embedded use-cases should be considered. However there isn't much co-operation, and lots of NIH. 6. Is there something like a top-three of most important goals that you (personally, not thinking of the group as a whole) would like to see addressed by Gnome/mobile? (Three would be great, one is enough too) Removal of the DBus forks of EDS and GConf. I'm working on the former now and appear to have become the maintainer of the latter, so I hope that I can either improve it enough that it is merged back in, or GSettings replaces it. And today: 7. How do you perceive Gnome/mobile today? What is missing? What is too much? What is / could be Gnome/mobile's first priority goal? And second? I think it's in danger of stalling and becoming dormant. I must take some of the responsibility for this because I didn't manage to make a 2.26 release last autumn. As I said above, I hope to get back into this and make a 2.28 release (I'll email about this separately). Technically: 8. What do you think should qualify a platform for being a Gnome/mobile platform? A specific set of components used? If yes, which components? A precise definition is tricky because of the nature of the mobile world. Is a device which just uses GTK+ considered a minimal GNOME Mobile device? What about Moblin, which uses Clutter/nbtk for it's primary toolkit but also uses gvfs, GStreamer, GConf, gnome-keyring and so on? Maemo currently uses GConf, GStreamer, GTK+ and so on, so is clearly GNOME Mobile. However in the future it will be using Qt as the UI, yet apparently still use many of the non-UI GNOME components such as GStreamer and GConf. Is this still GNOME Mobile? "Some of the lower libraries and GTK+ or Clutter" is about as precise as I can get. 9. Or should there be a formal qualification process? If yes, what would be your idea about it? If not, why not? No. There is too much variation in the embedded/mobile market for this to make any sense. 10. What should be the technology goals of Gnome/mobile? Like creating a toolbox rather than a product? Or collaboration and information infrastructure rather than a development project? I'd say it should be focused on creating a toolbox of suitable components, and a community for sharing best practises. Organisation: 11. At the moment the Gnome/mobile group is a pretty loose group, everyone interested is welcome and can at once participate. Would you like to see this a little more formally structured? Like a formal membership, application process, levels of membership, voting processes, etc.? Or would like to see it grow as is, a group connected by ideas and consensus rather than rules? Other ideas? The current informal structure works well in my opinion. Ross -- Intel Open Source Technology Centre http://oss.intel.com/
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