Re: Reboot: Strategic goals for GNOME

[Stormy Peters <stormy peters gmail com>]

On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 6:46 AM, Richard Stallman <rms gnu org> wrote:

   The combination of technologies going under the name "HTML 5" have
   made/are making web technology based applications finally competitive
   with those built using conventional toolkits such as Qt, GTK+, and the
   Windows and Mac equivalents.

If everything gets done inside or through your browser, it would make
toolkits such as GTK and desktop environments such as GNOME obsolete,
except as platforms for a browser.

I personally use a lot of web apps and I still need desktop and GNOME type technologies both on my desktop and my phone. (And my netbook.) We need to develop GNOME in ways that encourages developers of web apps to consider it, either as building blocks or as a way to have an app integrate with their service.

We need to work on things like:

a) Making our apps more web friendly, like Tomboy is doing with Snowy.

b) Integrating with web apps in ways that make sense. Like Diego was talking about with Facebook. Like things the Telepathy and Empathy teams have been working on.

c) Think about developing our own "free" web alternatives like identi.ca did. I'd especially like to see an open alternative to Dropbox/Ubuntu One. But there are lots and lots of web apps that people use regularly that could use alternatives. Social networking, finances, managing collections, ...

Stormy