[Desktop_architects] round 3

[John Cherry]

On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 16:33 -0700, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> by popular demand, now in ASCII and incorporating yet more feedback. and still 
> not for distribution ... ;)

Actually, inline text is optimal!  :)

The Open Source Desktop: A Commitment To Commonalities
======================================================

A Recognition of our Successes

When we started working on what would eventually come to be popularly
referred to as “the open source desktop” most regarded it as an
amazingly ambitious concept. Over the years thousands of volunteers and
passionately creative people proved that it was possible. In the process
of creating this software we formed a thousand projects with nearly as
many unique  perspectives, technological answers and identities.

Harming what brought us this success would obviously be retrograde, but
leaving it as is also does not serve us well.

A Recognition of our Challenges

Today we have greater expectations for our software than ever, as do our
users and those who would wish to use open source desktop software. We
are pushing at the boundaries of what is possible given our current
methods at nearly every turn. 

ISVs, both open and closed source, are looking for greater clarity.
Users are looking for better hardware support and advanced graphics
capabilities. System integrators are looking for easier means to roll
out and support open source desktops. We want to do things we've only
yet dreamed of.

To accomplish these goals often requires working together. We need a
unified approach to the hardware driver challenge. We need to pool our
relatively scarce graphics expertise to extend our shared graphics
technologies to the next level. We need to agree on which common,
non-differentiating technologies to share to increase consistency
without diminishing our identity or goals.

This will better equip us to address the global appetite for technology.
We have a huge number of people to address, many of whom have yet to
make their technology choices. 

A Proposal and a Commitment

Therefore we, as a community, propose to engage each other and reach
beyond our own borders to address our common challenges. To do so we
propose to engage more fully in cooperate enterprise that reflects the
values and mechanisms of the community we collectively hail from: the
open source desktop.

Rather than trying to compete amongst ourselves for the current limited
resources and users in our ecosystem, we must look to cooperatively
expand the borders of open source to include the billions of people on
this planet who are looking for good technology that suits their needs
and desires.

Specifically we are committing to creating a healthy and productive
technology incubator in the form of FreeDesktop.org by augmenting its
past successes with a set of light-weight processes that work the way we
do within our own projects. We are taking aim at issues such as common
mimetype activation, standard access mechanisms to desktop data and
services and more.

Specifically we will be making greater use of common public
communications entities such as OSDL and encourage our individual
marketing organs to collaborate.

Specifically we will support what works for us all, laying aside our
differences and linking our strengths together in the process.




The Open Source Desktop: A Common Stance
========================================

Plurality and Current Success

There is a large number of successful open source software groups
working on various  desktop technologies. These groups often have
specific goals, different perspectives and  unique identities. Our
technologies are not commonly shared at every level. This plurality of
approaches and projects has given us an astounding variety of software
that stands on its own merits in that millions of people from every
corner of the Earth use it daily.

However, as each of our islands of technology have grown from being
separate entities and small archipelagos of achievement, their borders
have begun to meld and form a larger continent of software that is
widely regarded and referred to as the open source desktop. This is a
momentous achievement that few outside our community believed possible.

Commonalities and Future Success

We have a number of commonalities when it comes to goals and needs that
go beyond our common appreciation of the attributes of Free software and
which can be best, and in some cases only, be solved if we work
together.

We recognize the need for a consistent experience for both users and 3rd
party developers, of both the open and closed source varieties. We
recognize the daunting task that lies before us on the hardware driver
front and in the graphics technology layers we all share. 

It is therefore our resolve to work on these common needs so as to pool
our resources and to avoid the sort of technological collisions that
benefit no one. We believe that done in a positive fashion we will
increase the fun of working on these technologies by depoliticizing
them; we believe that by working together we can accomplish more in less
time; we believe that combining our talents we can produce the best
results possible.

The Path Proposed

To achieve this loosely stated and grand vision we commit to:

going beyond our own borders while respecting our unique identities and
needs
participating in organizations that reflect the communities we hail from
harmonizing our public messages in support of the open source desktop as
a whole

Specifically we are committing resources to a healthy and productive
technology incubator in the form of FreeDesktop.org by augmenting its
past successes with a community feedback and stakeholder driven set of
policies. We are taking aim at issues such as common mimetype
activation, standard access mechanisms to desktop data and services and
more.

Specifically we will be making greater use of common public
communications entities such as OSDL and encouraging our marketing arms
to collaborate more than ever.

Specifically we will support what works for us all, laying aside our
differences in the process.




FreeDesktop.org: A Working Proposal
===================================

Why FreeDesktop.org and The Status Quo

FreeDesktop.org was created by our community for our community: the open
source desktop. We enjoyed a rapid succession of early successes and
have had a continued stream of commonly useful specifications and
technologies emerge from it. FreeDesktop.org was built to reflect not
external needs and requirements, but our own processes.

We do recognize that the current organization, as such currently does or
does not exist, is sub-optimal. We maintain that the concept itself of a
shared technology incubator is valid. Therefore we make the following
proposal to steer FreeDesktop.org towards being a practical and
productive place for everyone.

The goal is to create a working center of shared technology for
ourselves which will create the happy by-product of providing a more
coherent set of products for our users, industry and 3rd party
developers.

The Proposal, Part 1: Stakeholders First

Web based collaboration software will be provided at FreeDesktop.org
wherein interested and participative parties from the various projects
engaged in open source desktop development may create identity. This
identity will then be used to mark the interest and implementation level
of their respective projects in the various specifications and software
available.  This will raise the visibility of participation (or lack
thereof) in specific approaches, even allowing for automated reporting
and notifications of the same.

Combined with responsible tabling of new specifications and
technologies, we will as a greater community be able to measure the
status and health of any given technology when it comes to shared
support which in turn exposes consensus (or lack thereof). Once a given
specification has reached a high level of support, currently defined
generally as having the support of both of the primary desktop projects
(KDE and GNOME) as well as any primary stakeholder projects (e.g. X.org
for X related technologies), then these technologies will be handed off
to a standards body for formalization and announcement. We propose the
FSG and OSDL respectively for these formalization activities.

The goal is to add as little overhead as possible to the processes while
allowing us to see who is collaborating on what and when a given topic
has matured to the point that it can and should be codified.

The Proposal, Part 2: An Organizational Committee

A committee made up of members from the primary desktop projects and
approriate community stakeholders will be formed to aid in communication
and, when necessary, conflict resolution when it comes to
FreeDesktop.org activities. 

We recognize that the majority of open source desktop developers are
generally supportive of but lacking in time and motivation to keep up
with every machination at FreeDesktop.org. Therefore the committee will
act as community triage to ensure that the proper people in their
individual spheres of community and influence are involved. This will
ensure the proper people are involved allowing the above stakeholder
process to work. 

As an institution, the committee will not itself make technology
decisions nor steer the specification processes, though individuals on
the committee may be personally involved in various FreeDesktop.org
efforts. In the hopefully rare cases when unresolvable differences are
met, then the committee will act as conflict resolution agents.

John

> 
> once we have substance agreed on i'll go through and do thorough grammar / 
> spelling check (though i did fix a few things in this go-through as well). 
> feel free to point out errors as always, and keep the ideas coming ... 
> hopefully a few more iterations and we'll have something we can shop around 
> to our individual projects for feedback and support and get these documents 
> out by next week latest.
> 
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