Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap
Hi, Juanjo Marin wrote: * GTK is losing popularity. It is perceived by a lot of people as old and difficult. I think we need any kind of action on this area because is a cornerstone issue. Less programmers means less applications and contributions. We need to care of our platform users in the same way we care of our desktop users. Some people has pointed this in the past, eg [1] Perhaps the fact that GTK+ is seen as a cornerstone issue is a cornerstone issue... there's no specific reason why GTK+, FLTK or EFL would do the job just as well of providing a toolkit. What's important to GNOME is the vision and the philosophy of open access, but that vision has somehow lost the hustle that comes from homesteading. * It seems we have lost the mobile battle. Can we do something about it or simply retreat?. I like the idea of creating more components and some of this components can be added to the GNOME mobile platform. Have we lost the mobile battle? It certainly appears that GTK+ has lost the mobile battle, but all of the hard work that GNOME hackers have put into the middleware platform and components like Gstreamer, Dbus, Telepathy and Pulseaudio are now cornerstone parts of both the free desktop and the mobile platform. I would agree that the GNOME GUI platform is not exciting application developers right now, and that's something we need to fix. And it's not an easy problem. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap
2010/2/22 Dave Neary dne...@gnome.org: Have we lost the mobile battle? It certainly appears that GTK+ has lost the mobile battle, but all of the hard work that GNOME hackers have put into the middleware platform and components like Gstreamer, Dbus, Telepathy and Pulseaudio are now cornerstone parts of both the free desktop and the mobile platform. I would agree that the GNOME GUI platform is not exciting application developers right now, and that's something we need to fix. And it's not an easy problem. I'd like to add a bit of an optimistic overtone here. GTK+ might not be exciting for mobile developers, but I don't think none of the companies supporting it were seriously pushing the toolkit into that direction rather than monkey patching it to make it work well enough. So I'd say that GTK+ has gained very little in that regard as all this time it's mostly RedHat supporting the maintainership weight of the stack and the ones pushing it forward as a company over the years. However, GTK+ is still the de-facto toolkit for the X.org platform, people aiming to write apps that integrates well with the Linux desktop, choose GTK+, sure it has many issues, but it has also many great things and a rock solid code base. In a broader sense, I think that maybe we should put back our focus on promoting the stack as what it really has been and still is for most people, a platform to create great desktop applications for the Linux platform. -- Un saludo, Alberto Ruiz ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap
I do agree that we need a vision and a long term roadmap. When I ask about goals or vision, most people respond with something very specific and technical. I feel like we need to have a bigger vision that is universally shared. Where will GNOME be in 5 years? What will it do? What products/projects will be a part of it? Who will be using it? What world problem will it have solved? Stormy On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 12:41 PM, Alberto Ruiz ar...@gnome.org wrote: 2010/2/22 Dave Neary dne...@gnome.org: Have we lost the mobile battle? It certainly appears that GTK+ has lost the mobile battle, but all of the hard work that GNOME hackers have put into the middleware platform and components like Gstreamer, Dbus, Telepathy and Pulseaudio are now cornerstone parts of both the free desktop and the mobile platform. I would agree that the GNOME GUI platform is not exciting application developers right now, and that's something we need to fix. And it's not an easy problem. I'd like to add a bit of an optimistic overtone here. GTK+ might not be exciting for mobile developers, but I don't think none of the companies supporting it were seriously pushing the toolkit into that direction rather than monkey patching it to make it work well enough. So I'd say that GTK+ has gained very little in that regard as all this time it's mostly RedHat supporting the maintainership weight of the stack and the ones pushing it forward as a company over the years. However, GTK+ is still the de-facto toolkit for the X.org platform, people aiming to write apps that integrates well with the Linux desktop, choose GTK+, sure it has many issues, but it has also many great things and a rock solid code base. In a broader sense, I think that maybe we should put back our focus on promoting the stack as what it really has been and still is for most people, a platform to create great desktop applications for the Linux platform. -- Un saludo, Alberto Ruiz ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap
seems gtk+'s object model overhead (for example, object method invocation) is too high, especially visible on mobile platforms... it should be possible to optimize to reduce this overhead... On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 11:27 AM, Dave Neary dne...@gnome.org wrote: Hi, Juanjo Marin wrote: * It seems we have lost the mobile battle. Can we do something about it or simply retreat?. I like the idea of creating more components and some of this components can be added to the GNOME mobile platform. Have we lost the mobile battle? It certainly appears that GTK+ has lost the mobile battle, but all of the hard work that GNOME hackers have put into the middleware platform and components like Gstreamer, Dbus, Telepathy and Pulseaudio are now cornerstone parts of both the free desktop and the mobile platform. I would agree that the GNOME GUI platform is not exciting application developers right now, and that's something we need to fix. And it's not an easy problem. Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Neary GNOME Foundation member dne...@gnome.org Andy Tai, a...@atai.org Happy New Year 2010 民國99年 自動的精神力是信仰與覺悟 自動的行為力是勞動與技能 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap
Do you have *any* number to back up these kind of assertions? Because if you do I'd really like to have them. Otherwise it's just made up nonsense, and I can play that game too. For instance, GObject is 400% faster than any other similar object system*. Ciao, Emmanuele. * if implemented on top of carrier pidgeons using UV ink and a blacklight On 22 Feb 2010 20:26, Andy Tai a...@gnu.org wrote: seems gtk+'s object model overhead (for example, object method invocation) is too high, especially visible on mobile platforms... it should be possible to optimize to reduce this overhead... On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 11:27 AM, Dave Neary dne...@gnome.org wrote: Hi, Juanjo Marin wrote: * It seems we have lost the mobile battle. Can we do something about ... Andy Tai, a...@atai.org Happy New Year 2010 民國99年 自動的精神力是信仰與覺悟 自動的行為力是勞動與技能 ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap
On 2/22/10 11:27 AM, Dave Neary dne...@gnome.org wrote: * It seems we have lost the mobile battle. Can we do something about it or simply retreat?. I like the idea of creating more components and some of this components can be added to the GNOME mobile platform. Have we lost the mobile battle? We seem to have forfeited a sizeable chunk of it to date, unfortunately. It certainly appears that GTK+ has lost the mobile battle, but all of the hard work that GNOME hackers have put into the middleware platform and components like Gstreamer, Dbus, Telepathy and Pulseaudio are now cornerstone parts of both the free desktop and the mobile platform. Well, we've certainly managed to place GNOME at an enormous disadvantage with respect to an alternative, quasi-open-source platform, like Android, largely through a couple of years' worth of inattention and, more importantly, an ongoing failure to engage with the commercial mobile ecosystem in any positive and meaningful way. Hopefully, some efforts might be made to correct that in the coming year; whether or not that actually happens, or will be effective if it does, is very much up in the air in my mind. The viewpoint held in some quarters which is directly hostile to such engagement has been a negative factor for us in the past and continues to be one. Google, for all that its Android efforts have been competitive to GNOME's interests in the mobile space, has done a much better job here. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap
2010/2/22 Lefty (石鏡 ) le...@shugendo.org: Well, we've certainly managed to place GNOME at an enormous disadvantage with respect to an alternative, quasi-open-source platform, like Android, largely through a couple of years' worth of inattention and, more importantly, an ongoing failure to engage with the commercial mobile ecosystem in any positive and meaningful way. Hopefully, some efforts might be made to correct that in the coming year; whether or not that actually happens, or will be effective if it does, is very much up in the air in my mind. Do you have any examples of the GNOME community being negative or hostile towards the commercial mobile ecosystem? The viewpoint held in some quarters which is directly hostile to such engagement has been a negative factor for us in the past and continues to be one. Google, for all that its Android efforts have been competitive to GNOME's interests in the mobile space, has done a much better job here. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list -- Un saludo, Alberto Ruiz ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap
On 22/02/10 19:27, Dave Neary wrote: Hi, Hi, * It seems we have lost the mobile battle. Can we do something about it or simply retreat?. I like the idea of creating more components and some of this components can be added to the GNOME mobile platform. Have we lost the mobile battle? It certainly appears that GTK+ has lost the mobile battle, I don't think that's so true. Just because Nokia decided to buy Trolltech because it could be bought, doesn't mean the rest of the world agrees. but all of the hard work that GNOME hackers have put into the middleware platform and components like Gstreamer, Dbus, Telepathy and Pulseaudio are now cornerstone parts of both the free desktop and the mobile platform. Dare I mention Tracker amongst those other projects? ;) -- Regards, Martyn ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap
On 22/02/10 20:26, Andy Tai wrote: seems gtk+'s object model overhead (for example, object method invocation) is too high, especially visible on mobile platforms... it should be possible to optimize to reduce this overhead... I agree with Emmanuele. Please provide evidence when making wild accusations. -- Regards, Martyn ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap
I hesitate to reopen this discussion, frankly. Look at the archives for December and January. On 2/22/10 1:12 PM, Alberto Ruiz ar...@gnome.org wrote: 2010/2/22 Lefty (石鏡 ) le...@shugendo.org: Well, we've certainly managed to place GNOME at an enormous disadvantage with respect to an alternative, quasi-open-source platform, like Android, largely through a couple of years' worth of inattention and, more importantly, an ongoing failure to engage with the commercial mobile ecosystem in any positive and meaningful way. Hopefully, some efforts might be made to correct that in the coming year; whether or not that actually happens, or will be effective if it does, is very much up in the air in my mind. Do you have any examples of the GNOME community being negative or hostile towards the commercial mobile ecosystem? The viewpoint held in some quarters which is directly hostile to such engagement has been a negative factor for us in the past and continues to be one. Google, for all that its Android efforts have been competitive to GNOME's interests in the mobile space, has done a much better job here. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap
On Mon, 2010-02-22 at 13:39 -0800, Lefty (石鏡 ) wrote: Hi Lefty, I hesitate to reopen this discussion, frankly. Look at the archives for December and January. We need to consider that that wasn't our community. In that Alberto has a point that our community itself isn't negative or hostile towards commercial mobile ecosystems. Cheers, Philip On 2/22/10 1:12 PM, Alberto Ruiz ar...@gnome.org wrote: 2010/2/22 Lefty (石鏡 ) le...@shugendo.org: Well, we've certainly managed to place GNOME at an enormous disadvantage with respect to an alternative, quasi-open-source platform, like Android, largely through a couple of years' worth of inattention and, more importantly, an ongoing failure to engage with the commercial mobile ecosystem in any positive and meaningful way. Hopefully, some efforts might be made to correct that in the coming year; whether or not that actually happens, or will be effective if it does, is very much up in the air in my mind. Do you have any examples of the GNOME community being negative or hostile towards the commercial mobile ecosystem? The viewpoint held in some quarters which is directly hostile to such engagement has been a negative factor for us in the past and continues to be one. Google, for all that its Android efforts have been competitive to GNOME's interests in the mobile space, has done a much better job here. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list -- Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer home: me at pvanhoof dot be gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org http://pvanhoof.be/blog http://codeminded.be ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap
What's important to GNOME is the vision and the philosophy of open access, The philosophy of GNOME is that the user should have freedom. If we talk in terms of open or access then we omit what is most important. Stormy asked people to suggest a vision for 5 years from now. I can't contribute to the practical side of that, since foreseeing the future is not my forte. But at the philosophical level it is crucial to keep freedom for the users front and center. What world problem will GNOME have solved? The problem of non-free software in the desktop. ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap
On Mon, 2010-02-22 at 20:27 +0100, Dave Neary wrote: Juanjo Marin wrote: * GTK is losing popularity. It is perceived by a lot of people as old and difficult. I think we need any kind of action on this area because is a cornerstone issue. Less programmers means less applications and contributions. We need to care of our platform users in the same way we care of our desktop users. Some people has pointed this in the past, eg [1] Perhaps the fact that GTK+ is seen as a cornerstone issue is a cornerstone issue... there's no specific reason why GTK+, FLTK or EFL would do the job just as well of providing a toolkit. I agree. What's important to GNOME is the vision and the philosophy of open access, but that vision has somehow lost the hustle that comes from homesteading. I'm going to decline from commenting much on philosophy this time. Mine is probably known, and people must be (really) tired of listening to it. After talking with some of the doers at our conferences, at FOSDEM too, I believe our doers have a pragmatic, not a puristic philosophy. That's why I made my earlier comment that our community itself isn't negative or hostile towards commercial mobile ecosystems. * It seems we have lost the mobile battle. Can we do something about it or simply retreat?. I like the idea of creating more components and some of this components can be added to the GNOME mobile platform. Have we lost the mobile battle? It certainly appears that GTK+ has lost the mobile battle, but all of the hard work that GNOME hackers have put into the middleware platform and components like Gstreamer, Dbus, Telepathy and Pulseaudio are now cornerstone parts of both the free desktop and the mobile platform. In mobile we're doing pretty well at the middleware segment. But indeed ... I would agree that the GNOME GUI platform is not exciting application developers right now, and that's something we need to fix. And it's not an easy problem. I think that's a self inflected problem. Because for years wasn't Gtk+ (the toolkit) being innovated on. Instead is the focus 'stability'. Regretfully we see the same thing in most of the original core components: the focus isn't innovation. We're not leading. We are seeing a lot of innovation in middleware, though. I am very, very pleased that the GUADEC organizers have put a focus on metadata in their call for papers. Cheers, Philip -- Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer home: me at pvanhoof dot be gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org http://pvanhoof.be/blog http://codeminded.be ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
