hey, remember the platform?

[Havoc Pennington]

On Fri, 2005-07-01 at 17:49 -0400, Adam Jackson wrote:
> Developers do get retarded about this though.  Or at least that's my 
> impression from reading the gnome and kde planets, which granted don't make 
> much distinction between core people and random headcase in the corner with a 
> blog.  There's a very real desire out there to use some sort of official 
> freedesktop blessing as a way of coercing adoption.  That's not preventable, 
> that's human nature; but we don't have to walk into it.

Oh I'm right with you. We had this problem within GNOME in a bad way for
a while; we had to flame it out of existence. The message is, your
software is not going to get fiated into place. I've posted the same
about freedesktop.org.

We should just correct the people who think this. Including both people
who propose not-baked stuff for the platform; and people who think the
platform is somehow "forcing" them to adopt not-baked stuff when it
isn't and has no such intention. The platform has nothing to do with
making software successful.

I've written about platform goals in the past and IIRC:
 - integration testing a list of things to be depended on as a whole,
   rather than requiring people to worry about each library/spec 
   individually
 - communication of a list of mature stuff to vendors and ISVs
 - a release engine to drive new versions of the component items
 - encourage an open source community around this stuff
  
Havoc