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

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Rich Burridge wrote:
> I was talking about things like:
>
> * look and feel. It's a beautiful desktop.
> * ease of use. Most things "just work".
> * integration of different desktop components.
>
> I'm not talking about market share.

This of course is a personal question that everyone has to answer for 
themselves; if GNOME made a beautiful just works super-integrated 
desktop, that did not in the end have that many users (that failed to 
bring an open source alternative to the general public); vs. if GNOME 
made a lot of not-desktop-in-the-traditional-sense things and some of 
them had a chance to reach the general public on a large scale; which 
would we rather have. I know for sure that if people are honest with 
themselves, we have a lot of developers on both sides of this question.

I'm not sure we're doing either of those things right now though - our 
current audience-benefit focuses that I've listed a few times don't care 
_that_ much about "just works" or beautiful or integration. Not as much 
as Apple's creative professionals audience does, for sure.

So we tend to prioritize things like hackability/configurability, 
diversity of apps, interoperability, i18n, reliable releases, 
management/security, and so forth over more Apple-like priorities. The 
de facto audience here winning over the audiences some people might more 
idealistically have in mind.

The "enterprise Linux" distributions have some strong incentives 
different from the Apple-style priorities as well.

Havoc