On Sun, 2007-04-22 at 12:27 +0200, Thilo Pfennig wrote: > On 4/21/07, Sriram Ramkrishna <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Sat, Apr 21, 2007 at 03:19:48PM +0200, Thilo Pfennig wrote: > > > > > c) In relation to that i fear that this binds ressources that > > > otherwise would have been there for the core desktop. > > > > The people doing embedded GUI are already captured resources and > > are now being paid to work on GNOME whether embedded or otherwise. > > Ok, thats a ood point. But still it is a switch in focus, isn't it? I > understand that no every project can be talked about publically but
Is it? How much? Avahi is in the embedded initiative. Lennart is still going to be doing the same things he was doing earlier. He might be getting more patches from Nokia and Intel perhaps to deal with their platforms. But it doesn't change much. Intel is going to be talking with Nokia regarding the Hildon platform. Intel might be sending patches to GTK+ regarding bugs or what not. The players in each of these parts are going to be pretty much doing the same thing. There might be new avenues of discussion but I still see people pretty much doing the same thing they were doing earlier. I think we're just doing a formal recognition of work that is already on-going. We would be fools not to recognize it. The embedded space is going to create a strong recognition (I hope!) of the GNOME/GTK+ brand even more than the desktop since these days the GNOME desktop is marketed more as: * SLED10 desktop * Fedora Core Desktop GNOME hardly gets much mention and it's really about the distribution. (something I would like to see changed myself, but that's another topic) > the question is if such a major step should not be discussed inside a > broader part of the public. I do not mean the details of the deal but > about the changes that are implied. Ok, if all will follow (developers > and users) this will work. But if not we would have a deal that does > not work. Ok maybe I am being too sceptical. Last GUADEC, I interviewed the various new 'GNOME' companies that have been started by entrepreneurs in our community and it seemed very apparent that Nokia was single-handedly creating a embedded space market based on GNOME over the past 18 months or so hiring GNOME developers and X developers and moving them to Finland as well as investing in other companies to work other parts. I realized that Nokia was very serious in creating a market. I would not be surprised now that Intel has joined, that Palm won't follow. You can bet that other companies are watching. What I'm saying is that the clues were already out there. I wasn't privy to anything the board was doing but when I connected the dots it was quite clear. So I wasn't very surprised about this announcement. It made perfect sense. For some reason I seem to recall hearing about such an initiative. I don't know if that was some ad hoc discussion somewhere or what. Perhaps, we are probably guilty of not talking about the embedded space at all. We've been mostly been working on the website and getting that going. > > The thing about focus is difficult. Web applications are also part of > the desktop - but is currently not really on our focus. > I think Red Hat is working on such a convergence. Certainly the merging of social networking and the desktop is something we should be also starting in my opinion. The framework needs to work on a bit more. The framework will also aid the embedded space with ready applications for "on the go" teens. > So question is: Does GNOME just go where the money is or does GNOME > have a vision? These are point that should not be excluding each > other, but I think its important to know how things are moving or are > decided. GNOME in part goes where our developers are interested in. GNOME isn't making money off embedded space. Nokia and Intel are. We have the benefit of more people eyeballs looking at improving our platform. GUADEC is getting a lot of high profile sponsors. IMHO GNOME should be a ubiquitous platform to create a great user friendly desktop. Perhaps the desktop platform is a reference platform that we can show off to the world but certainly others like Novell are making GNOME into their vision of what the desktop should be. Our jobs is to create brand identity, to create a market, and to bring new contributors into our project by God have fun doing it. :-) One thing we should do is not to take ourselves too seriously. > I think we had lengthy discussions in the past how GNOME marketing > should be and also we talked about who we should talk to. As it comes > out it looks like the REAL marketing has not much todo with what we > discussed. That said I dont think that this is generally bad. But I > think our discussions and what we do should reflect each other. Agreed. But I really grow tired of the marketing discussions. If I ever have to go through another "What is GNOME?" thread I will grow quite depressed. > > If I look at GnomeMarketing page this does not reflect our new focus. > I do not see embedded hardware vendors as a primary target group. This > means that we did not see this coming? Or maybe it just means that > those who saw it never entered any informations about it. > That sounds more like just people are lazy and haven't gotten around to it. I mean, look at developer.gnome.org. It's so full of old crap it's not even funny. We just hate documentation ;) > This makes any marketing discussion based on old goals and assumptions > senseless and shallow. Maybe overly harsh, don't you think? sri -- Sriram Ramkrishna <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- marketing-list mailing list marketing-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-list