Re: focus! (was Re: Focusing on innovation re: mono, python et al)

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>]

On Jul 18, 2006, at 9:50 PM, Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay wrote:
> Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > My first-order answer is that GNOME thinks of itself as "making a
> > desktop" - even though the _reality_ is that the larger GNOME
> > community/ecosystem is doing way more than that, and that the larger
> > tech industry is doing still more.
>
> Would you consider junking the concept of "GNOME as a desktop" in 
> favor of "GNOME as an application development programming context" or 
> would think that the slicing should go deeper ? Namely, percolating 
> the idea right down to the level where applications are developed 
> around GNOME core (assuming the segregation of GNOME core and GNOME 
> extras).
> ...

If that happened, the platform developers would likely have less 
interaction with application developers on mailing lists like this one. 
So you'd be more likely to end up like the W3C's HTML Working Group has 
with XHTML 2.0 -- spending huge amounts of time producing an extremely 
elegant platform that's useless for real-world applications.

To ensure usefulness of the platform for as many distributors as 
possible, perhaps it would be better for Gnome to contain *a 
representative sample* of software for various genres (office, artist, 
scientist, gamer), skill levels (cf. iLife vs. Apple's "Pro apps", or 
Microsoft Works vs. Office), and hardware types (desktop, PDA, OLPC) -- 
so you can demonstrate that Gnome is a suitable development platform 
for all those audiences, rather than trying yourself to solve all the 
problems of any single audience.

Gnome-wide efforts on things like usability, localization, library 
deprecation, etc would also be less effective if it was reduced to an 
"application development programming context".

Cheers
--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/