hey all... so here's the most recent drafts of these documents i've been working on.. again, thanks for everyone's input. these revisions have some additions to them, some rewording, etc ... that i hope reflects as much of the input i've received to date:
--------------------------- COMMUNITY: The Open Source Desktop: A Commitment To Commonalities A Recognition of our Successes When we started working on what would eventually come to be popularly referred to as “the open source desktop”, most regarded it as an amazingly ambitious concept. Over the years thousands of volunteers and passionately creative people proved that it was possible. In the process of creating this software we formed a thousand projects with nearly as many unique perspectives, technology answers and identities. While harming the mechanisms of success would be retrograde, we find ourselves needing to evolve our processes to meet new challenges that come with expanding horizons. A Recognition of our Challenges We have greater expectations for our software than ever. Our users and those who would wish to use open source desktop software feel similarly. Due to these increasing expectations, we are pushing at the boundaries of what is possible given our current methods at nearly every turn. ISVs producing both open and closed source software are looking for greater clarity and direction. Users are looking for better hardware support and advanced graphics capabilities. System integrators are looking for easier means to roll out and support open source desktops. We want to do things we've only yet dreamed of. To reach these goals it is increasingly neccessary that we work together. We need a unified approach to the hardware driver challenge. We need to pool our relatively scarce graphics expertise to extend the relevant systems we share to the next level. We also need to agree on which common, non-differentiating technologies to share to increase consistency without diminishing our individual projects' identities and goals. This will better equip us to meet the global appetite for technology that makes up our audience. We have a huge number of people to address, many of whom have even yet to make their initial technology choices. A Proposal and a Commitment Therefore we, as a community, propose to engage each other and reach beyond our own borders to address our common challenges. To do so we propose to create more cooperative endevours that reflect the values and mechanisms of the community we collectively hail from: the open source desktop. Rather than trying to compete amongst ourselves for the current limited resources and users in our ecosystem, we must look to cooperatively expand the borders of open source to include the billions of people on this planet who are looking for software that suits their needs and desires. Specifically ... we are committing to creating a healthy and productive technology incubator in the form of FreeDesktop.org by augmenting its past successes with a set of light-weight processes that work the way we do within our own projects. We are taking aim at issues such as common mimetype activation, standard access mechanisms to desktop data and services and more. Specifically ... we will be making greater use of common public communications entities such as OSDL and encourage our individual marketing organs to collaborate. Specifically ... we pledge our support to efforts that improve the open source desktop as a whole by utilizing the multiplicity of strengths that are to be found amongst the various projects. We believe such combined efforts that respect our diversity while encouraging cooperation are key to fulfilling our aspirations of making the open source desktop the best personal computing platform availalable. -------------------------- PUBLIC: The Open Source Desktop: A Common Stance Plurality and Current Success There are a large number of successful open source software groups working on various desktop technologies. These groups often have specific goals, different perspectives and unique identities. Our technologies are not shared at every level. This plurality of approaches and projects has given us an astounding variety of software which in combinatoin stands on its own merits as evidenced by the millions of people who use it daily around the world. However, as each of our islands of technology have grown from being separate archipelagos of achievement, their borders have begun to meld and form a larger continent of software that is widely regarded and referred to as "the open source desktop". This is a momentous achievement that few outside of our community believed possible when we began. Commonalities and Future Success We have a number of commonalities when it comes to goals and needs that go beyond our common appreciation of the attributes of Free / Open Source software and which can be best, and in some cases only, be solved if we work together. We recognize that users as well as 3rd party developers require a consistent experience. We recognize the daunting tasks that remain before us, such as hardware driver availability and in improving the graphics technology layers we all share. It is therefore our resolve to work on these common needs so as to pool our resources and to avoid the sort of technological collisions that benefit no one. We believe that done in a positive fashion we will increase the enjoyment found in working on these technologies by depoliticizing them; we believe that by working together we can accomplish more in less time; we believe that combining our talents we can produce better results than we can separately. The Path Proposed To achieve this loosely stated yet grand vision we commit to: - going beyond our own borders while respecting our unique identities and needs - participating in organizations that reflect the communities we hail from - harmonizing our public messages in support of the open source desktop as a whole Specifically ... we are committing resources to a healthy and productive technology incubator in the form of FreeDesktop.org by augmenting its past successes with community feedback and stakeholder driven policies. We are taking aim at issues such as common mimetype activation, standard access mechanisms to desktop data and services and more. Specifically ... we will be making greater use of common public communications entities such as OSDL and encouraging our marketing arms to collaborate more than ever. Specifically .... we will support what works for us all, laying aside our differences in the process to achieve the most ambitious goal we've ever dared tackle: to make the open source desktop a mainstream phenomenon. ------------------------- FD.O PROPOSAL FreeDesktop.org: A Working Proposal Why FreeDesktop.org and The Status Quo FreeDesktop.org was created by our community for our community: the open source desktop. We enjoyed a rapid succession of early successes and have had a continued stream of commonly useful specifications and technologies emerge from it. Most importantly, FreeDesktop.org was erected to reflect not external needs and requirements but our own processes. We do recognize that the current organization, as such currently may or may not exist, is sub-optimal. However we also maintain that the concept of a shared technology incubator is in itself valid. Therefore we make the following proposal to steer FreeDesktop.org towards being a more practical and productive place for the creation and improvement of shared technologies. This will in turn result in the happy by-product of providing a more coherent set of products for our users, industry and 3rd party developers. The Proposal, Part 1: Stakeholders First Web based collaboration software will be provided at FreeDesktop.org wherein individual participants from projects engaged in open source desktop development may create identities. These identities will then be used to mark the interest and implementation level of the respective projects in the specifications and software available on FreeDesktop.org. This will raise the visibility of participation (or lack thereof) in specific approaches and allow reporting and change notification to be automated. Combined with responsible introductions of new specifications and technologies, as a community we will be able to measure the status and health of any given technology when it comes to shared support. This in turn exposes consensus or lack thereof. Once a given specification has reached a critical level of support, currently generally defined as having the support of both of the primary desktop projects (KDE and GNOME) as well as any primary stakeholder projects (e.g. X.org for X related technologies), then these technologies will be handed off to a standards body for formalization and announcement. We propose the FSG and OSDL respectively for these formalization activities. The goal is to add as little overhead as possible to the processes while allowing us to easily monitor collaboration and measure when a given technology has matured to the point that it can and should be codified. The Proposal, Part 2: An Organizational Committee A committee made up of members from the leading desktop projects will be formed to aid in communication and, when necessary, conflict resolution that may arise around FreeDesktop.org activities. We recognize that the majority of open source desktop developers are generally supportive of but lacking in time and motivation to keep up with every development at FreeDesktop.org. Therefore the committee will provide community triage to ensure that the proper people from the relevant communities and spheres of influence are involved. This will ensure that the proper people are involved allowing the stakeholder-driven process to work. As an institution, the committee will not itself make technology decisions nor steer the specification processes, though individuals on the committee may be personally involved in various FreeDesktop.org efforts. Measurements of Success Near term success will be measured in the level of support for FreeDesktop.org within the open source community and the rate and quality of specifications that emerge. Mid-term, the level of satisfaction of open source desktop users and ISVs will be an important metric. But the ultimate measure of success will be found in the enjoyment and energy levels of those participating in FreeDesktop.org as it is from that wellspring that the momentum we are all looking for will emerge. -- Aaron J. Seigo GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43 Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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