FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers’ Meeting is coming soon, and in preparation, the organizers have published interviews with some of the participants: David Faure for KDE and Michael Meeks for GNOME.
FOSDEM 2003 will take place February 8 and 9, 2003 in Brussels, Belgium.
The two-day summit will bring together leading developers in the Open
Source community. As each year, FOSDEM attendees will have the
opportunity to attend to the talks of the leading developers of major
Open Source and Free Software projects. Entrance and participation to
talks and tutorials are free.
FOSDEM 2003 will also feature:
– Developers’ Rooms where developers of leading Open Source and
Free Software projects can meet and discuss of the advancements of their
project (GNOME, KDE, Mozilla, Embedded Systems and PostgreSQL)
– Tutorials which are more practical sessions where attendees
will be able to learn about the technologies presented during the talks
– The Free Software Award that will reward this year again the
developer of an important and leading Free Software project. Richard
Stallman will give the award during the FOSDEM.
The series of interviews begins today with the interviews of 2 speakers
of the Desktop session:
– David Faure for KDE
– Michael Meeks for GNOME
See the main FOSDEM site for general information.
OK, this story has been hanging here for awhile, and still no comments. Meanwhile, I thought it had one quote in there that was nothing short of explosive:
http://www.fosdem.org/index/interviews/interviews_meeks
“Alain Buret – People often complains that GNU/Linux is not ready yet for the desktop among others due to the lack of support of multimedia applications. Do you think they are wrong?
Michael Meeks – Yes – I’m fairly convinced they’re wrong; but then I judge what other people need by my own workflow where Sibelius via xmms is idylic luxury while I type. That coupled with the fact that I think projects like GStreamer are beginning to provide Gnome with a powerful multi-media platform. I’m not convinced Gnome is (or ever will be) ready for the Home / Personal desktop market in terms of the functionality that people expect today.”
OK, am I insane to find this part deeply disturbing?
“[quoting Michael Meeks] I’m not convinced Gnome is (or ever will be) ready for the Home / Personal desktop market in terms of the functionality that people expect today.
Hello??!! A guy who is a vital part of working for the project tells us that in effect they will not only not be able to compete with M$, but actually, simply never able to meet the functionality needs of the consumer???!!! Well, why not declare defeat and go home! Can you imagine having the general in charge of your troops tell you before the battle: “we should figure out the most efficient way of losing”. Is this guy working for M$FT?
I can understand saying “we are in a different space – don’t want to compete directly w/ the dominant desktop (M$), but to say that Gnome may be NEVER ready for the home/personal desktop as far as functionality people expect? So not only are you saying “we can’t compete with M$” (ok, that could be legitimate), but “we can’t meet the needs of users, period, and never will be”!
OK, flame me. Am I just misreading things insanely?
What a downer to have one of the premiere developers who gets PAID to work on Gnome say such things… how does it make the other developers feel, who are putting in their time for free, not to mention their passion and beliefs? And what about the users? Whoa man, either the sushi I ate was bad last night and I’m totally misreading this, or something is very wrong here.
I don’t think so, I think he’s voicing the opinion of a lot of people who have already switched.
Consumers (ie windows/mac users) expect linux to be exactly like there previous os wich is blatantly wrong. It’s a different beast.
I have a friend of mine who is still in the windows world doing his thing so I show him openoffice and mozilla (wich he finds f*cking amazing btw) but he’s afraid ot the total switch because he fears losing his abilities he aquired with windows.
Others don’t want to switch because they use a zillion freeware/shareware apps withouth a functional counterpart in linux (never mind that 99% of those utilities are unnecessary in the *nix world)
and so on and so on
I myself am a verry happy debian user.
Personally I’m still amazed how much time I lost using windows (I was considered the “expert” in my little niche of the world) but now I have switched I haven’t looked back.
give it another year and there will be a desktop for the common “newbie” but they will still refuse to switch because app xxx doesn’t work or is too different (never mind that its easier faster better in the *nix world
just my 0.02cents
I am a FreeBSD user, and to some extent, I agree with what you say.
The best *BSD/Linux can hope for on the desktop is to capture the “top 15%” of the computer users. The average user is as thick as two short planks and twice as ugly. The chances that Joe and Jane Bloggs going to move from their comfy little rutt is high unlikely.
As for software, I’ll say it once, and I’ll say it again. We need a porting fund to pay the large software players to port their applications to Linux/*BSD. I can name one argument to why companies should port, most people who use *BSD/Linux know how to use a computer, hence, it will highly bloody unlikely that you’ll get thousands of Linux/*BSD users ringing up complaining their accelerator pedel and cup holder aren’t working. Hence, the only costs are the maintainance of the code + the occasional promotion.
As for that shareware/tucows crap. That is the sole course of every Windows screw up I have seen. Lusers downloading and installing unneeded crap that brings the whole computer to a scretching halt. If one were to be object, lets look at what is on tucows. 100’s of text editors, “schedulers”, spyware, demoware and “install but can’t bloody uninstall”-ware.
If that is what the OSS community has to compete against, well, OSS has already achieved it.
Yeah, I’ve tried multiple times to try to switch my sister from MSN Messenger to a Jabber client. I told her the numerous advantages but she refuses because she likes the icons and all her friends use it. All the rest, as she concerns, is utterly crap and not usefull. This is just a small example, but a lot of people think like that if it concerns their OS too.
If they gain nothing, they won’t switch.