2007/7/23, Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:



Hi there,

I think that we should talk more about the problems that we want to solve
and the interesting "bits" of the web world and how to integrate them into
the gnome land instead of talking about flickr integration and .emacs
uploading.

What do people like about "the web":

 * They don't have to deal with files and folders, just content.
(personally, I love this from the usability point of view).
 * They don't have to deal with installers.
 * On community sites, it's easy to share the "online experience" with
others. However they usually have some kind of lock-in, for example, youtube
and metacafe users cannot "talk" to each other.

They don't care if it's centralized or decentralized, they only care about
what are they enabled to do. Now, what can't they do with the web:

 * They cannot work offline.
 * They cannot talk to the hardware (since web servers shouldn't be access
to the hardware information directly due to security reasons).
 * They cannot have low latency vertical applications, such as video
editing (however, this is mostly a bandwitdth problem).

IMHO we should try to merge the best of both worlds and get rid of the
disadvantage of both at the same time (sounds easy huh? }:-) It would be a
tremendous error to get the bad bits on the web landscape into the desktop.

Centralized vs. Decentralized:

My gut feeling is that we should learn from our own experience in source
development, DSCM has taught us how useful and important is to work offline
and being able to work without syncing on each change. I can't see why
source code development is any different on document writing, or cad desing.
For example, abicollab approach is great, work collaborative and at the same
time, you have a central point to store the common work[0].

Security:

I was really disappointed about the lack of interest on privacy and security
that Havoc expressed in his keynote (don't get me wrong, I do think that
your keynote was great Havoc), maybe home users don't care about it, but
basically that is due to a couple of things:

* People trust by default, they don't know the details of how technology
works, user and password makes them think that's all the security they need.
* The lack of secure-enabled competing products, as an example, (is there
any distributed gmail?).

Corporate users do care a lot about security, and the major adoption of
GNOME besides developers and enthusiats are large corporate deployments. We
should take a closer look about it. However, as long as our
service.gnome.org thing have distributed and opensource version (such as
XMPP works) that can be aggregated, that can be workarounded. But it's
definitively something that we should care about.

[0] http://collaborate.abisource.com/
--
Un saludo,
Alberto Ruiz
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