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<title>The Open Source Desktop: A Commitment To Commonalities</title>
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<h2 align=center>The Open Source Desktop: A Commitment To Commonalities</h2>
<h3>A Recognition of our Successes</h3>
<p>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, technology answers and identities.</p>
<p>These successes have expanded our horizons: more developers, more users, more ambitious goals. To meet the new challenges that are emerging, we must evolve how we work as a community without breaking the traditions that have brought us this far.</p>
<h3>A Recognition of our Challenges</h3>
<p>We have greater expectations for our software than ever before. Some wish to set new records in terms of usability, stability, beauty and performance while others wish to bring the notions of software freedom and openness to the world at large. In the process we are pushing the envelope of what is possible given our current methods at nearly every turn.</p>
<p>ISVs producing both open and closed source software are looking for greater clarity and direction. 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. Users with disabilities are looking for computers that are fully accessible to them. We want to do things we've only yet dreamed of.</p>
<p>To reach these goals it is increasingly neccessary that we work together as a stronger team. We need a unified approach to the hardware driver challenge. We need to pool our relatively scarce graphics expertise to extend the relevant systems we share to the next level. We also need to agree on which common, non-differentiating technologies to share to increase consistency without diminishing our individual projects' identities and goals.</p>
<p>This will better equip us to meet the global appetite for technology that makes up our audience. There are a huge number of potential teammates for us in this world, many of whom have yet to make even their initial technology choices.</p>
<h3>A Proposal and Commitment</h3>
<p>Therefore as a community we propose to engage each other and reach beyond our own borders to address our common challenges by creating more cooperative endevours that reflect the values and mechanisms of the community we collectively hail from: the open source desktop.</p>
<p><i>Specifically ...</i> 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 aim at address issues of implementation standardization to increase software interoperability; provide standard access mechanisms to desktop data and services for ISVs; improve our graphics software architecture; pool our HCI efforts and more.</p>
<p><i>Specifically ...</i> we will be making greater use of public communications commons such as OSDL and encourage our individual marketing organs to collaborate. As individual projects, our public messaging should reflect not only the source project, but also harmonize with common themes that work to support the open source desktop as a whole.</p>
<p><i>Specifically ...</i> we will amplify our participation in efforts led by organizations such as the Free Standards Group to bring about powerful open standards for the platform that address critical needs such as accessibility.</p>
<p><i>Specifically ...</i> we pledge our support to these and other efforts that improve the open source desktop by utilizing the multiplicity of strengths that are to be found throughout the community. We believe that efforts that respect our diversity while encouraging cooperation are key to fulfilling our aspirations of making the open source desktop the best computing platform availalable.</p>
<h3>Things You Can Do Now</h3>
<p>As a member of an open source desktop project, consider showing your support by engaging in one or more of these suggested activities:
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<li>Go to freedesktop.org and get involved with one or more of the proposed technologies. Bring new proposals that you feel are appropriate to the table.</li>
<li>Look through your program's codebase for one fix you can pass back upstream to your dependent libraries, desktop environment, etc. and work to get it accepted and incorporated upstream.</li>
<li>Round up key contributors from your project and visit another project that is related in some way. Engage them in a discussion of how you can make your two projects better collaborators.</li>
<li>Add your project's name to this document and publish it on your website.</li>
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