Are today's online services consistent with GNOME's mission?

Are today's online services consistent with GNOME's mission?

Posted Jul 26, 2007 14:41 UTC (Thu) by hp (subscriber, #5220)
In reply to: Are today's online services consistent with GNOME's mission? by hp
Parent article: An "online desktop" for GNOME?

One other thing: historically, the GNU Project started by slowly replacing bits of Solaris and proprietary UNIX, because they could not do a 100% free system fully formed from scratch.

We're effectively in the same situation today. Sure there's a 100% free client OS, but I don't know anyone who uses exclusively a client OS and never uses the web. How many people do you know who don't use a search engine, or that only use a free search engine?

Pretending that today we have a 100% free computing solution is just bogus. (Virtually) nobody is using only the free part. They are all using the web.

We have to solve this problem. But it will be solved by defining what freedom means for server apps, and then coding server apps that use that definition.

It won't be solved by hoping server apps go away, because the user benefits are too large. If we refuse to adapt the desktop to how people are using their computers, that just makes the desktop suck more than it could have and ensures there's one less reason to switch from Windows.

It's not like the world will say "oh, GNOME has minimal web app integration, I guess I'll stop using web apps."

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