Re: What would you do to encourage application developers on GNOME Mobile?

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Thu, 2010-04-29 at 15:40 -0600, Stormy Peters wrote:
> I talked to a number of people at the Linux Foundation Collaboration
> Summit about this. Robert McQueen had a great idea. He suggested that
> we use a Google Summer of Code model but not just for students. People
> I've spoken to all seem to like the idea so I wanted to get your
> opinion.
> 
> Here's how I would see it working:
> * Couple of leaders from this group.
> * Interactive open process to define projects. (People can submit
> their own ideas.) Projects would be doable in a couple of months.
> Projects would all be GNOME mobile app/MeeGo/Maemo related.
> * We would form a group of potential mentors. I'm not seeing this as
> intensive as Google Summer of Code mentorships but we still need
> people to be able to answer questions and provide direction.
> * Hold an application process. People apply and indicate which project
> they want to work on.
> * Mentors/leaders approve applicants. "Success" is defined.
> * The time period is fixed and is the same for all projects.
> * At the end, leaders/mentors decide if projects have successfully
> been completed.
> * Successful applicants get paid.
> 
> If we paid $5,000/project, we could have 10 projects.

Our rate of success with these kinds of projects is not high. And I
think it will be even harder for mobile to find mentors with the time
and motivation, making success even less likely.


More importantly, I don't think this helps much with Quim's goal, though
it is admittedly vague:
"
Last Summer we announced the plans to base our UI and application
frameworks on Qt, leaving GTK+ and Hildon as "community supported". The
fund was planned a concrete step to help consolidating that community
support, benefiting current and future Maemo users.
"

So I think, at the very least, some effort should be made to get GTK+
and Hildon working reasonably well on Maemo Harmattan, when there is
some public SDK to base that on. Otherwise you can encourage all the
little apps you like but they won't run on the next version of Maemo
anyway.



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