During his opening speech at the GNOME Developers conference GUADEC Jono Bacon, community manager for the Ubuntu distribution, called for a common vision inside the project, an area in which the project as a whole is currently lacking. Only a few hours later Red Hat developers Havoc Pennington and Bryan Clark presented their own proposal for a reinvention of the Open Source desktop: The GNOME Online Desktop. My take: As I have been saying for a long time, GNOME needs a vision (and leaders) for the future. I'm glad that people are finally stepping up.
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Member since:2005-11-10
Apple don't seem to have a problem with exciting their developers about their APIs and developer tools. Heck, even as a Windows user before I knew about their APIs and developer tools, that's one of the draws to the platform.
GNOME need to be more public, inviting and transparent with their developer features and APIs to attract people to the platform. They also need to show some excitement. KDE is beating them in every way - they've Plasma and QT4 which a lot of people will have heard of, even if they don't know what they are, and an exciting new vision for the desktop with KDE4
If anything, I'd say GNOME are overreacting... and setting themselves up for a fall. Get developers excited about what you've got now - not some pie in the sky ideas that just arn't practical. I don't want a gecko-box. I like being offline sometimes thank you.
Member since:
2005-07-08
Yeah, not such a great idea. GNOME may want to be Mozilla really badly, but that's not their destiny. KDE realized that as a free software desktop environment, their primary objective is to work hard at making the desktop development environment more productive. That's what KDE4 is about.
GNOME is a desktop project. Their next step is to think about how they can make the task of developing applications for the desktop easier and more compelling. Now is not the time to give up on the desktop and refashion GNOME as a window manager for Gecko.
After all the work Havoc Pennington has done for the free software desktop, now he's surrendering. He's saying that it's time to admit that the web has won, and that free software must scale back its ambitions to become a portal to the web. Or maybe he's surrendering to KDE. But either way, he's giving up.
The desktop is only dead in Havoc's self-fulfilling prophecy. A lot of free software developers are really excited about the innovative new development frameworks emerging for the free software desktop. Maybe not so much is happening on the GNOME side of the aisle. But that doesn't mean there isn't interest in an effort to reinvigorate the GNOME development environment.
Edited 2007-07-19 04:27