Peteris Krisjanis <pecisk <at> gmail.com> writes: > I think we are in same business as Apple - we are trying to offer > unified user experience. Difference between us and Apple though is that > (in my opinion) most of us strongly believe that openness/freedom and > consistent user experience (trough user interface and system design and > behavior) can be in same boat (versus "Walled garden" and "guided > experience"). I think we can all agree that's our vision. > First: Watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp0HIF3SfI4 so you know what I'm going to reference.
What you say is not a vision. That's a "what", not a "why". Also, are we in the same business as Apple? Apple is in the business of challenging the status quo and thinking differently. ($:04 in the video) Are we? WHY are we doing GNOME? The second thing is one that has been nagging me since I've started working on GTK. I talked about in my talk at Berlin in 2011. And so far, nobody has provided a good answer for it: We are not answering some of the most basic questions you need to answer for any product about how we are doing it. Like these: Who are we doing it for? Well, we sometimes say it's for "everyone", but that's just not true. If it was for everyone, we wouldn't require OpenGL and spend our time on bringing GNOME 2 to mobile phones instead of reinventing the one thing we were good at (the Linux desktop). But even if we were for everyone, we have to have some people we like more than others. We already picked people that don't want to fiddle with their configuration over people that do want to fiddle with their configuration. We've also been picking people that need simple consumer applications over content creators. Or we wouldn't have written contacts, clocks and a new shell, but would have worked on improving GIMP, Inkscape, Glade or Pitivi instead. And it looks like Wacom users with lots of VMs that require Kerberos logins are way Who are we selling it to? This question is not about the person who is going to use it in the end. It's about who is taking what we produce and doing stuff with those things we gave out. Apple for example doesn't just sell to users, it also sells to shops and to mobile network operators. And Android is sold to OEMs. So who are we trying to convince to use GNOME? Is it distros? Is it OEMs? Is it end users? All of them? Because if it's distros, we've lost a bunch with the GNOME 3 transition (Ubuntu, Meego/Tizen) and I don't see us trying to win them back. If it's OEMs, we haven't done much better. If it's end users, then why don't we have a product for them? The only product we have that targets end users directly is jhbuild... So HOW are we actually doing this? So that leaves the what question. It's a question most people aren't sure about either. Are we doing a desktop? A tablet interface? Maybe phones? Are we for kiosks? Do we ship a platform for others to build upon? All of it? We do have a bunch of guidelines (unified experience, HiG etc) that you outline, but from my POV we are clearly missing answers to a lot of these questions. And these questions are important for me as a GTK developer to answer. in the recent theming discussion - where theme developers complain that GTK breaks their themes every release - I need to know what to do about it and what to spend my time on. Do I make their lives easier? Or do I instead work on new features desired for GNOME 3.8? Do I look more or less at GTK portability to other platforms (like Windows, OSX, or even running on top of KDE or Unity)? Should I take time looking into porting Libreoffice to GTK? Should I improve devtools like Glade instead of GTK? I can roughly answer all of these questions myself. But I have no idea WHAT we as the GNOME community think is important. Benjamin PS: Another example for the why/how/what thing: Mozilla believes in an open web. They educate about and develop software to make this open experience easy. Wanna use their browser and phone? _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list