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

[Philip Van Hoof <pvanhoof gnome org>]

On Thu, 2010-05-06 at 18:37 +0200, Murray Cumming wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-05-06 at 15:00 +0100, Rob Taylor wrote:
> > I'd quite like to hear what people here think 
> > our focus, as stakeholders in the GNOME project, should be. 
> 
> Better software and APIs by being more open. I don't think Qt compares
> well with us, because it's still not open enough. 

It's a two-way street. While working on RDF, which is an area where both
'camps' can or could cooperate together (and are trying, with Nepomuk),
I noticed a lot of mistrust at _both_ sides.

However as soon as you show your intent to trust the other side, things
often move quickly.

We for example talked with the Strigi people about splitting off their
libstreamanalyzer library, so that we can maybe in future reuse this for
the Tracker FS miner's extractors.

Delighted they agreed and are now working on preparing the library just
for that.

We also agreed that both projects would concentrate on Nepomuk as
ontology. Both are now strongly moving in that direction, making entire
future desktops and metadata environments interoperable.

With the Nepomuk-KDE people we agreed on SPARQL as query language. ETC

> However, persuading some people of that is hard, but nobody ever
> convinced a programmer of anything by any logical reasoning.

Right, emotions like "trust" work better for "convincing".

You get "trust" by doing your main conference together a few times.

Unfortunately the GNOME 'camp' (what an ugly term) decided to only do
that once per two years (but we'll see in three years). Which isn't
enough to get enough mutual trust fast enough to make a meaningful
difference in the IT industries that we're both in.

And there are a lot of 'GNOME projects' that would benefit enormously if
there would be more trust and cooperation with the Qt guys.

But.. unfortunately..


Cheers,

Philip

-- 


Philip Van Hoof
freelance software developer
Codeminded BVBA - http://codeminded.be