On Wed, May 27, 2020 at 7:31 AM philip.chimento--- via foundation-announce <foundation-annou...@gnome.org> wrote:
> * Foundation mission/vision > * Allan: I would like to get an idea of the direction of travel for this, > and a working group will work on it. The main question is what we think is > most important: user share of GNOME desktops? Or our influence as a project, > impact on the software industry and wider world? > * Britt: I'm in favour of the influence side, as it's a truer > representation of what the GNOME community today is. We don't contribute to > GNOME because we want user share, we do it because we want to make the best > software possible. However, correctly or incorrectly, a common perception of > GNOME is that we force our ideas onto users. We should either embrace that or > avoid it altogether, but not in between. Currently it seems like we walk a > line where we don't say it but we do do it. I think either the mission > statement should be neutral, or embrace this perception. > * Federico: I think we should focus on the first approach (increasing > adoption), since the second one (influencing the software industry) is more > or less already the status quo. Users' freedoms are being eroded all the > time through proprietary and/or privacy-violating software. We need to give > them an obvious choice. It is easier for people to switch individual apps to > free software gradually (GIMP/Inkscape/whatever on Windows) than to make the > big jump to Linux systems. And yet we make very little effort to make our > apps available on those systems. They are available by default on Linux, or > with relatively little work, but making them available on Windows/Mac is > always dodgy. Stay tuned next week for the next episode as we continue the conversation next week. :-) Of course, I have no idea if this conversation is resolved or not - but given we are talking about the general approach to what GNOME wants to do in terms of a mission statement - I thought I would throw in my 2 cents and maybe encourage discussion here by foundation members in hopes that it becomes more clearer which direction to lean towards. I think it's worth considering learning towards influence - leading with technical achievements, flawless design, and a passionate community. Influence comes because people want to be part of those three. The larger your community grows and participates the better your project comes and that itself will lead to user expansion organically. But that influence needs to come with a solid sense that we need to interop with the rest of the open source communities that are out there - the role of open source and even open hardware is expanding in our daily lives. But the last mile is still proprietary (the interface to your personal computing) but we'll get there - but I think it is more important that we participate in other communities and not just look internally. If we build bridges to them they will build bridges with us and even possibly use our software instead of the proprietary desktop they use today. t;dir - the mission statement should encourage building on what we do, with the community we have, and work with others as much as possible. Best, sri _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list