Yesterday I brainfarted on the “Fun & GNOME” thing. I re-read it today, and I’m not too ashamed of it, so I said I’d let it free rather than wait until I have time to make it coherent. So, here it is.
Fun and GNOME
We’re changing the world. Melodramatic, but true. Software as social work – redressing the technical imbalances of the world by making IT available to all. Software doesn’t get built the same way. People’s expectations of software are changing. We are commoditising hardware. Write once, run anywhere, with GTK+ and GNOME. GNOME in China, in India, in Brazil. GNOME rocks my world, rocks the whole world.
Boring stuff is what I do. I feel honoured to work alongside people who make great software with a big heart. So I try to make their life easier. But I think GUADEC should have a registration fee (boo, hiss). I also think we should explain why (yay!).
Bringing back the community (good news, it’s not gone anywhere). Talking to people again. Encourage the companies around GNOME to hire GNOME hackers, rather than have employees hack on GNOME. Get Novell’s cool app developers committing stuff to the desktop again (even if that means including Mono in the platform). Same for RedHat & Canonical.
Shoot our mouths off. We’ve been watching what we’ve been saying, for fear of annoying or insulting some unknown people. Our company partners are here because we’re a bunch of badly dressed, loud-mouthed anarchists. If we don’t go back to that a bit, they’ll get bored.
Openness openness openness. Let everyone know what’s happening all the time. Why isn’t the planet syndicated in a sidebar on gnomedesktop.org? Or gnomedesktop on pgo? Talk to each other. More IRC, more time-wasting, more outreach/recruitment. Collect a list of people prepared to give GNOME presentations on the drop of a hat. GNOME Lovers are great. companies, don’t forget some people work part-time on this stuff. Try scheduling planning sessions on mailing lists, having them with IRC in parallel, posting minutes in the wiki.
GNOME is great. Don’t forget we’re changing the world. How could that be boring?
