[Promotion] Fitting apps into the picture

[Thilo Pfennig]

2006/8/7, Tom Chance <tom at acrewoods.net>:

> I roll my eyes when I hear people say "we need a GNOME version of K3B" or "a
> KDE version of The GIMP", as though the libraries used are relevant.

I think what many want is a complete KDE or GNOME desktop, meaning
that both communities want to do everything they can. I think only if
our goal is to have a common basis in the more far future, than I
would agree.

Personally I think we should have one core organisation that wants to
boost the open source desktop usage. This organisation would consist
of folks like those of freedesktop.org, Mozilla, KDE, GNOME and more.

>From that layer i think there could be different software projects and
distributions that strive to work together independently. That would
mean to give up KDE, Mozilla and GNOME organisations. Instead all
would try to find the best solution for future development. And as
programmers choose diffferent programming languages like C++,C or
Python they may choose to use different librairies. So in core GNOME
would be something like libgnome and not more and KDE libkde.

I could also think that from the LSB project and freedesktop.org we
come to define what we consider a common basis of a Desktop Linux.

So that would mean to have THE DESKTOPS not as prominent as today.
Instead THE DESKTOP would be the focus. I think if one would define
the core desktop today there would be a lot of redundant libraries,
just to able cd burning for both today desktops.

But we have see that distributions like Slackware and Ubuntu have
chosen to focus on one desktop, because supporting all is a lot work
for the distribution.

I think as long as there are so many organisations that work vertical
and fewer hierchical cooperation and organisation thinks will go slow.

I think the guys from Mozilla Foundations re doing a great job for
promoting Firefox. But right now neither KDE nor GNOME is having any
positive side effecrts out of the popularity.

This is because there does not seem to be a general open source
strategy. The only organisations that do seem to have a more
widespread organisation and thinking are the distributors and package
maintainers of the distributions. But still, a Debian maintainer does
not give too much thoughts about how Fedora or OpenSuse will benefit.
They do somehow, but I think there are only few people that think and
act in a way that helps a general goal.

GNOME had the 10x10 goal. I think if one is honest, this can never be
accomplished alone. This list and talks are a good beginning for more
cooperation, but I also think that it is still not enough to cooperate
on different technical levels plus marketing.

My longtime vision is that all greater goals like today for GNOME 3 or
KDE 4 will not be planned in one community, but that first one would
define a common goal and that than GNOEM , KDE and others try to
implement these goals.

I like how things go with Evince and KPDF that both work with Poppler
as there basis. But still these are cooperations here and there. The
question I want to raise is what to do with the organisations that we
do already have? I think still this future organisations would help to
 organize events like GUADEC or aKademy (but maybe put more of this
events on one place so that ppl can meet like the guys from
Xpdf,Poppler,Kpdf and Evince).

Thilo



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