GUADEC: GNOME OS conversations

At GUADEC, the "GNOME OS" concept was discussed off and on several times during the course of the week. The first mention of the subject came in a talk from Igalia's Juan José Sanchez Penas and Xan Lopez on the first day of the event. Their talk A bright future for GNOME dealt largely with what the GNOME project needed to do to address the mobile and embedded space. In that context, GNOME's current build and release system — which is focused solely on the desktop computing experience — offers nothing for mobile device makers to build on.

But, they said, if GNOME were to start producing a bootable OS image as one of its "deliverables," device makers would have a starting point that they could adapt to their own hardware. Although they did not provide specifics, they said that Igalia has spoken to mobile device makers who are not satisfied with the current market offering of Apple's iOS and Google's Android. GNOME has already done a lot of design and technical work to make GNOME Shell and other components touch-screen capable, they observed, but it remains bound to traditional PC hardware. A mobile-friendly GNOME would have a leg up on competing open source projects like Tizen, webOS, and Firefox OS, which have all had to "start from scratch". Their definition of "scratch" is not entirely clear, but it is certainly common for new Linux-based mobile platforms to write their own applications and supporting frameworks.

Although Sanchez and Lopez spoke of the benefits of having an installable GNOME for use as a base platform for mobile device makers, that was not the only reason the GNOME OS buzzword came up over the course of the week. The other — and perhaps more frequently-raised — issue is that GNOME has essentially never been presented as an end-user ready product. The cause is clear enough; as Colin Walters discussed in his talk, most Linux users get their software through a distribution's package manager. The trouble from GNOME's perspective is that distribution packages are typically delivered six months after GNOME drops its stable release, so when bug reports arrive they are almost a full development cycle behind. In addition, every distribution makes enough changes that whatever bug reports users do send in are difficult to triage and diagnose.

Making a bootable GNOME image one of the pieces in each GNOME release would allow users to try the unaltered packages sooner, and provide faster and better feedback to the project. It would also allow GNOME to develop an SDK for application developers who are interested in writing distribution-neutral GNOME code. Sanchez and Lopez proposed setting an "ambitious plan for 3.8 through 3.12" that would culminate in a mobile-capable release for GNOME 4.0. That time frame equates to two years using GNOME's current release schedule — not immediate, but not too far off to plan. Post-4.0, they proposed planning a GNOME SDK and working on application distribution channels and other components that a mobile GNOME ecosystem might require.

The meaning of OS

Allan Day addressed both the improved-testing-and-feedback rationale and the improve-GNOME-for-application-developers goal on his blog shortly after GUADEC. Nevertheless, there are still those who conflate the plan with a desire to transform GNOME into a full-fledged Linux distribution, a confusion that was evident in audience members' questions at GUADEC, too. It ought to be clear that GNOME would need to add a significant number of developers (not to mention packagers and infrastructure) to support a complete distribution, but perhaps "GNOME OS" is simply a poor choice of terminology. Sanchez and Lopez did refer to GNOME OS as a "distribution" in their talk, but when an audience member asked about it, they clarified that use of the term was a slip not meant to be taken absolutely.

Admittedly, there are those in and around the GNOME project who have more ambitious goals (Lennart Poettering had a session I was unable to attend that dealt with integrating GNOME components more directly with the kernel), but they are the exception. At its core, the idea is really about bridging the existing gap between the project and its users — as well as the gap between the project and application developers — in order to collaborate better with them. Given the number of times in recent years that the project has run into end-user backlash over design changes (in particular those instances that seem to revolve around a perceived lack-of-responsiveness to feedback), that would seem to be an admirable goal.

Vision quest

But the GNOME OS discussion has a subtext, which is the perception that GNOME as a project no longer has a long-term goal. On the one hand, that means that the original goal of producing a quality free software desktop environment has largely (or perhaps even completely) succeeded. But it also means that GNOME as a project is searching for a new target. There are plenty of people who feel that mobile devices are the answer; others (like Lionel Dricot) contend that online services are the new frontier, or (like Eitan Isaacson) that believe that targeting high-end workstation users is best.

The vision question also arose at the GNOME Foundation general meeting, which kicked off with the Release Team asking attendees what they wanted the Release Team's role to be. Specifically, the team asked whether or not the project ought to have a Technical Board to set the long-term vision and to make technical decisions. The team reported that it felt like some members of the project expected it to fill such a role, but that driving development was not its mission.

The resulting discussion was an interesting one; GNOME's culture has been "individual maintainers rule their modules" for a long time, but that concept does not extend well into a long-term roadmap. Bastien Nocera pointed out that in years past, it was often a single individual — such as Jeff Waugh — who either set or articulated the vision for GNOME. Since Waugh's departure, no one has replaced him in that function, although Nocera pointed out that Jon McCann's UI demos have served as a de facto substitute in recent years.

Others pointed out that while vision was an important topic on its own, practical matters still dominate, such as making the final call on which version of Python to support. A Technical Board should make such a decision (which affects many modules), but it is hardly a matter of "vision." Clearly individual GNOME developers are producing high-quality work and driving the project forward. But focusing that energy, whether into GNOME OS or toward another goal, is a task that the project is still working out.

[The author would like to thank the GNOME Foundation for travel assistance to A Coruña for GUADEC. The event was deftly organized and smoothly run from start to finish, sported a universally high-caliber program, and an enthusiastic crowd at every turn. Plus, as the photographs in the story above hint, A Coruña was an inspiringly-scenic location in which to spend a week discussing and learning about open source. Thanks to everyone who put in time and energy making the conference a success.]