On Thu, Jul 13, 2006 at 10:37:34PM +0100, Iain * wrote: > Some questions that I don't have answers for: > > Does GNOME have a "product" to market? How many people really get > GNOME from GNOME as opposed to the distros? Is it more the distros > place to take the software we write and put it together as a cool > package that gets marketed as "Do cool stuff" as opposed to GNOME > which we market as "Has support for 52 different languages..."
IMHO, the product we sell is "usability". We take the scary and confusing world of computers and try to make it conform into a system that is both simple yet powerful enough to let a wide variety of people to be able to use it effectively. These people can be those who who want to participate in the online culture, manage their financial life, or to enjoy a game or two. We want to enable that without the stress that's usually involved in doing it. "Just Works" right? As the user intended? Maybe. :-) > How does the knowledge that we need software X work in a free software > world where people work on whatever they feel like? We have no > managers who can say "We need an instant messenger" and put 10 people > to work on it. How does it affect our module selection process to be > looking for "Doing cool things" rather than any software that meets > the release criteria? I think it depends on how you frame the problem. People work on something if the problem is interesting enough. Let's take for instance documentation, which for a lot of us, is uninteresting. But this year we've been able to grow that team because the team was able to attract volunteers who are interested in solving the documetnation problem. I know now at least 2 people who are asking questions on the lists which haven't happened for a long time. I think it comes down to finding and attracting volunteers who can solve the problems we need to solve. How does one do that? I'm not sure, but we do seem to be reaching people. But take note, that we have been solving (most of) our problems with the resources we have. Granted a lot of us in GNOME are employed to work on them, but I don't think our problems are any different than other open source projects and they tend to get things done as well that needs to be done. My two cents. sri -- _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
