hello, it's me again =) bryce sent a long and highly useful set of thoughts by email to me this morning. i've incorporated his thoughts and done some more refinement. in particular there are now "do this now" ideas at the end of the community message and less verbage in general.
the FD.o page wasn't touched, so i'm not including it in this email. as a side note, i'd like to release these under a creative commons license once all is said and done. perhaps: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.5/ -------------------- 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. These successes have expanded our horizons: more developers, more users, more ambitious goals. To meet the new challenges that are emerging, we must evolve how we work as a community without breaking the traditions that have brought us this far. A Recognition of our Challenges We have greater expectations for our software than ever before. Some wish to set new records in terms of usability, stability, beauty and performance while others wish to bring the notions of software freedom and openness to the world at large. In the process we are pushing the envelope 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 as a stronger team. 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. There are a huge number of potential teammates for us in this world, many of whom have yet to make even their initial technology choices. A Proposal and a Commitment Therefore as a community we propose to engage each other and reach beyond our own borders to address our common challenges by creating more cooperative endevours that reflect the values and mechanisms of the community we collectively hail from: the open source desktop. 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 aim at address issues of implementation standardization to increase software interoperability; provide standard access mechanisms to desktop data and services for ISVs; improve our graphics software architecture; pool our HCI efforts and more. Specifically ... we will be making greater use of public communications commons such as OSDL and encourage our individual marketing organs to collaborate. As individual projects, our public messaging should reflect not only the source project, but also harmonize with common themes that work to support the open source desktop as a whole. Specifically ... we pledge our support to these and other efforts that improve the open source desktop by utilizing the multiplicity of strengths that are to be found throughout the community. We believe that efforts that respect our diversity while encouraging cooperation are key to fulfilling our aspirations of making the open source desktop the best computing platform availalable. Things You Can Do Now As a member of an open source desktop project, consider showing your support by engaging in one or more of these suggested activities: * Go to FreeDesktop.org and get involved with one or more of the proposed technologies. Bring new proposals that you feel are appropriate to the table. * Look through your program's codebase for one fix you can pass back upstream to your dependent libraries, desktop environment, etc. and work to get it accepted and incorporated upstream. * Round up key contributors from your project and visit another project that is related in some way. Engage them in a discussion of how you can make your two projects better collaborators. * Add your project's name to this document and publish it on your website. ---------------------- 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 combination 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 shores of achievement, their borders have begun to meld and form a 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 Beyond our shared appreciation for Free and Open Source software, we have a number of common goals and needs and which can be best, and in some cases only, solved when 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 address our common needs by pooling resources and avoiding technological collisions that benefit no one. We believe that by combining our talents and efforts we can accomplish more in less time, produce better results and increase the level of enjoyment derived from participation. 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. -- 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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