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

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 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.

btw, I bet GNOME can do all three of the strawman things I brought up 
here. But it's a matter of not trying to do them all in one big soupy 
way, but getting laser focus on each. Not thinking of any of them as 
"make a desktop," but something more specific in each case that may or 
may not involve a desktop, and if it does may also involve additional 
stuff on top of it.

Havoc