Congratulations on a highly successful year!
Thanks for this opportunity to chime in. There's a lot to process here;
for brevity's sake I will only share a few initial thoughts at this time.
On 12/23/18 2:46 PM, Norman Feske wrote:
Hallo everyone,
hereby, I'd like to follow up on our tradition to discuss Genode's road
map on the mailing list. Let's take the turn of the year to recapture
the events of 2018 and make plans for the next twelve months. Please
feel welcome to chime in! By mid of January, I'll finalize Genode's
official road map and would like to take your input into account.
[snip]
For me personally, this ride was certainly the most rewarding period in
Genode's history so far. Now, when looking at the result, I am
overwhelmed about what we achieved together! Whenever I have the chance
to showing off Sculpt running on my laptop, Sculpt doesn't fail to impress.
I completely agree with this assessment. I think the Year Of Sculpt has
tied enough loose ends together that the framework has reached the
"plateau" phase, and the focus now shifts to building upon it.
That said, during the course of the year, this positive sense of
achievement eventually blended with the rather dull feeling that our
hard work remains largely unnoticed outside the inner circle of Genode
enthusiasts. The public at large remains quite indifferent (e.g., I was
unable to capture the interest of FOSDEM to feature a talk about Sculpt
OS on their main track). For a long time, I tricked myself into
believing that once we overcome all technical road blocks, Genode will
eventually become widely recognized automatically. There was always a
technical challenge to take on. With Sculpt, we have reached a point
where this excuse doesn't hold anymore. There is no technical piece missing.
I agree that there is no technical piece missing. But as an old refugee
from the Amiga, etc., I'm painfully aware that the best technology
doesn't always get the mind- or market-share. (The FOSDEM news is
surprising, though.)
This leaves me with the question of how to make Genode relevant at a
larger scale? Since this is not a technical question, I admittedly
struggle to find a good answer. When thinking of the overall leitmotif
for 2019, I always come back to this question.
Plan for 2019
I see three directions to help Genode to become more widely recognized.
[snip]
1) Widening the audience of Sculpt OS
Sculpt works well, but it is arguably still too hard to use for
non-technical users and it lacks a lot of software that users take for
granted today. Consequently, we should improve its ease of use. In
particular, I'd love to explore the more consequent use of Sculpt's
component graph as an intuitive user interface for both the composition
and the configuration of components. The ultimate goal would be to
eliminate the need for editing any text files. With respect to software
availability, I have high hopes in the Genode SDK that we introduced in
Genode 18.11. Let's follow this route further.
I don't have any big ideas on this subject, but I just want to support
the idea of focusing on the Component Graph. It is a powerful (and
unique) feature, and I can't wait to use it for configuration also.
2) Fostering the community spirit around our project
Our project enjoys a healthy community of users and contributors. But
the community is rather scattered and the various groups work pretty
much in isolation. As a result, the work of one group is often invisible
to the others, not to speak of any public visibility. Could we possibly
establish an instrument that would help each participant to gain more
visibility and thereby help the community at large to become more
relevant? I'll come up with a concrete proposal for such an instrument soon.
This should really help us hit critical mass. It sounds like some
interesting (and unexpected) ideas are percolating already!
One technical element may be a feature of Sculpt that would allow the
user to browse the software depots provided by various community members
and install/deploy packages by just a few clicks. This would vastly ease
the discoverability of the available software and highlight the roles of
the respective developers.
I think this is a really important idea also.
[snip]
(I need to put more thought into the questions at the end, so I'll
respond to those separately.)
As a final thought, I'm really looking forward to what both Genode Labs
and the community do in the upcoming year, and to being part of it!
Happy Holidays!
John J. Karcher
[email protected]
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