[kde-community] Give People Access to Great Technology - a possible vision
Jaroslaw Staniek
staniek at kde.org
Mon Sep 22 11:03:36 BST 2014
Thanks for this Andrew!
KDE offers the Great Technology and a brand indeed. Below in my looong
2c for the vision topic, written with the widest possible user base in
mind, some devil's advocate approach, assuming that we are developing
for users, for self-development, and for fun, in no universal order.
Before anyone proposes "Built for Plasma" or even "Built for KDE" it
can remind "Built for Windows", "Built for iOS". This makes sense for
a player that maintains a two-digit slice of the cake, not for us.
Linux desktop accounts for 1.5% or so. In the best case KDE has 1%. In
this light, skipping the 99% of users (out of them 0.5% are potential
active FOSS contributors) looks like lost opportunity, a gift made to
the competition.
99%+ of global desktop user base is waiting to even learn about our
apps. Knowledge of what KDE is comes later.
I imagine most of the support from the 99%+ crowd would be financial.
I am convinced most of them so often want to jut get the work done
and move along. If they would be sufficiently interested in technology
or digital freedom, and/or have time, they wouldn't use a non-FOSS OS.
The numbers for the successful Krita fund-raising confirm that. My old
numbers for Kexi (before 2008) confirm that too. Isn't this what we're
looking for?
The thing is people support what they use. Most of the supporters are
not early adopters. As soon as we let them to use apps the way they
(think they) need, you'd have chance to see the difference. "Ordinary"
people see themselves and act in smaller communities, not in all-or
noting. People that care about dogs, perhaps some species, but not so
much about all mammals.
Some of the supporters will learn about the big picture (KDE), fewer
would particularly care about that. Yet you can get support from them,
just for the app. Isn't this natural? Getting good figures for brand
affection is hard if the meaning is blurry. How about letting apps
have, build, their brands if they want? The great contribution of the
is the real enabler, a template or a lighthouse. For KDE it's a new
beginning.
On the other hand, most of you already get the money for developing
from a closed-oriented source: you work for a closed
vendors/services/whatever to be able to spend some savings for your
hobby. The above 99%+ manifesto is a more a variant of the same deal,
without indirections, and with bigger risk. It maybe just works only
for apps that offer value people are going to pay for. Plasma can be
one of the apps I am sure.
Add to this the large mobile market. With the app-is-the-center
approach, apps by KDE are able to enter the market, and compete with
the apps on equal terms i.e. without depending on success of some
(free?) tablet/mobile OS. Of course that's a choice to be made by
contributors individually.
In exact the same time when you're drawing the integration diagrams,
Canonical develops redundant integration, which (unfortunate!) despite
of using the same pillar (Qt), is a separate distinct effort. All this
happens, again, within the 1.5% of the desktop market, not counting
the mobile one.
Another: why even to declare the "personal technology ecosystem"? What
if some software is primarily aimed at organizations (companies,
universities)? For me, too much of declaration and formalisms is a
recipe for ignored message, by otherwise interested potential
supporters.
Similarly, at least half of the FOSS desktop app developers could
consider developing for KDE apps if they feel they're still developing
something that works OK on their beloved desktops, whatever these are.
Does it look like a solution for addressing the said "downward trend"
issue? For me, yes, even if I do not see a reason to compare the
numbers from the SVN- and git- workflow eras.
So apps for everyone in the center.
Would Frameworks be the center for engineers? Yes. We're good at
offering that. Not the KDE Frameworks, just Frameworks _by_ KDE.
It happens that KDE uses them, but advertising frameworks in a "KDE
uses then so they must be rocking" it is not proved to be an advantage
when we market Frameworks to non-KDE developers.
Plasma at the center? Putting emotions aside, for me that's definitely
NOT a reasonable strategy, it sets us for competition with even the
remaining ~50% of FOSS camp. We are smart with LXQt, Razor, and this
trend can be continued. Do you know Enlightenment folks love Qt
Creator? Windows folks? If you want this story to repeat with your
app, try to first find, then develop unique value. It's ideal if it's
hard to reproduce. Looking around is hardest part of the effort.
Note: I am Plasma user but this should not interfere with the
reality-check or analisys. 'Plasma at the center' reminds the 2005 era
indeed, however wonderful.
I'd rather spread this user-oriented perception: *Plasma is an app*.
Dear user, install it if you want this shell. You shouldn't feel worse
within the KDE community if you don't. Plasma is so flexible (and apps
from KDE are too) so they allow this scenario. Good, I feel we're
close to this point already.
The same goes with KDE's own desktop services like Akonadi. Even KIO.
KIO or Akonadi that I love to have. But on a platform where they
belongs to. KF5, modularization brought us here, and I feel "Plasma is
the center" would be a step back.
Integration with phones? There are Windows/Mac apps that happen to
offer similar fundamental connectivity features as KDE Connect.
Especially from Apple and MS, they somewhat merge the desktop and
tablet experiences, and Google goes up from tablet to light laptop.
Separate apps also exist so often not a part of OS. People around me
are not particular emotional about technical differences between
external/internal integration, they get that "with the hardware", or
install some 3rd-party extras. Looking back, the IE browser was also a
means to maintain advantage in the OS for its vendor, was a part of
the OS a lot more than it is now, and it was criticized and ended in
the court. I see how the deep integration approach is natural
temptation for system developers. Look, it can be deep but would be
ideal if can be made optional from the perspective of apps.
Some books say, to drag people to Plasma there should be a killer
feature not existing elsewhere. But in some book experts claim: we're
in a post-killer-app world. Features/apps get copied if it's really
worthy.
Securing a feature exclusively for us, to form a selling point, is
even harder within the FOSS. Some non-KDE camp would be able to
relatively quickly adopt most of the "breathtakingly beautiful look
and feel" Plasma 5 look/feel for an app if they really wanted
(technically and legally). Even on the web. And most probably the
Qt/KDE community will help with this for desktops again (as happened
with GTK-Qt theme engine, I have almost an "Oxygen" exprience in GIMP
and Inkscape here on my desk). This is about freedom. I am not
complaining, just good to be aware of the full consequences coming
from the FOSS orientation.
But: others cannot duplicate the KDE, the community. Also maybe the
great infra and the full development experience. And I am happy with
that!
Please consider having a simpler vision adequate to the <1% "market"
position. The diagram
[http://wstaw.org/m/2014/09/19/A_possible_vision.png] for me contains
all buzzwords that we can all hear in corporate offices, mainstream
conferences and in the media. I've seen so many of them in various
organizations (did you too?) and nothing happened, maybe because
execution of general plans that are formed out of such vision are hard
to verify.
Cloud? We're yet to have to eat our own dog food with that before even
proposing cloud orientation to even early adopters. Webdav KIO,
however built on a nice abstraction, is not a feature that makes
Plasma Cloud-oriented. "Plasmoids in the browser" would be, but I am
not fan of 100 goals, each eventually achieved in 10%. I am more for
finding a weak point in the (real) competition.
For now: a note (also to me)... while we're discussing we're using the
google infra [https://docs.google.com/file/d/0ByPjsJxADBehMVFMMTVSTzZPd00/edit]
even for rather simple tasks. And I have not seen a single plasma
activity being used/shared at a BoF or conference between attendees
(prove me wrong).
How could we advertise the tools/work-flows for other folks then?
Finally, Depending on hardware vendors for phones or TV sets?
Smart-watches? Smart home? I wouldn't depend on that in the community.
Please, I think lessons are learned not once. Nobody can be stopped to
repeat, but should this effort drain our resources? Technical features
is a minor factor in all these developments where big money sit with
politics, and long-term orientation.
I hope you extracted something very own for from this.
PS: +1 for Aaron, again, and David Wright.
On 19 September 2014 18:56, Andrew Lake <jamboarder at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I wanted to share a few thoughts in case it might be helpful right now. I
> apologize now for the length. Not that he necessary endorses any of this,
> but Thomas Pfeiffer was gracious enough to provide many of the examples of
> what we're already doing. A pdf that's a bit more readable is here:
> http://goo.gl/kDxkzI
>
>
> "Give People Access to Great Technology"
> - quote from Akademy 2014 Cornelius Schumacher's keynote
>
> A possible vision
> -----------------
>
> As a full time KDE user since 2001 and a more recent contributor, Akademy
> 2014 was tremendously inspiring and also quite sobering.
>
> How do we respond to the downward trend in the global PC industry that
> Cornelius Schumacher highlighted? How do we regain some of the focus Paul
> Adams suggests we may have lost? From the design side, it is certainly
> helpful for us to have a common focus that informs our design activities,
> and the recent discussions on this mailing list about a shared vision show
> that other community members agree. So what is a possible wider, shared
> vision that might make designs and their implementations more successful,
> focused and relevant? What follows are a collection of personal thoughts on
> how all these questions might perhaps be considered.
>
> What makes up our personal technology ecosystem?
> * Workstation
> * Laptop
> * Phone
> * Tablet
> * Camera
> * Bluetooth headset/speakers
> * Smart watches
> * Smart home (TV, Nest, Chromecast)
> * Cloud services (storage, contacts, email, calendar, music, photographs,
> video, social networking, text/video chat, collaboration)
> * Local services or applications (music, imagery, video, documents,
> development)
> * Vehicle
>
> In this ecosystem, what does “give people access to great technology” mean?
> Perhaps it could mean:
>
> "Enable people to be even more awesome by taking much greater advantage of
> every aspect of their technology ecosystem."
>
> _______________
>
>
> In this ecosystem, what does KDE currently provide or participate in?
> * Plasma desktop (Workstation, Laptop)
> * Plasma Active (tablet)
> * Plasma Mediacenter (smart TV)
> * KDE Connect (Phone)
> * Dolphin (Local services)
> * KIO (cloud services - storage)
> * Digikam, Gwenview (Local services - photographs, Camera, cloud services -
> photographs via KIPI)
> * Amarok, Juk (Local services - music, cloud services - music in the case of
> Amarok)
> * Dragon Player, Jungle (Local services - video, Cloud services - video)
> * Kate, Calligra (Local services - documents, cloud services - collaboration
> via KTE Collaborative)
> * KDevelop (Local services- development)
> * Akonadi, Baloo (Local services)
> * Akonadi, ownCloud, Kolab (Cloud services)
> * Telepathy (Cloud services - social networking)
> * Much more...
> * Frameworks to enable it all.
>
> The precise categorizations above might be debatable, but not immediately
> important. More important perhaps is how we might identify some
> opportunities.
> * Desktop applications
> * Already quite good.
> * How can applications take advantage of improved design and better
> integration of desktop capabilities to become better applications?
> * How can the desktop take greater advantage of application capabilities
> to become a better desktop?
> * Devices (phones, tablets, smart watches, etc.)
> * How can the desktop take advantage of device capabilities to become a
> better desktop?
> * How can devices take advantage of desktop capabilities to become better
> devices?
> * Cloud services - our own or others.
> * How can the desktop take advantage of cloud capabilities to become a
> better desktop?
> * How can cloud services become better because of the desktop?
> * “Cloud” here includes both centralized and decentralized services.
>
> To be crystal clear, we're already doing a lot of this stuff (and many of
> them we’re already talking about) so I think it’s fine to conclude “Hey,
> we’re already doing most of that!”. These thoughts are not intended to
> suggest an entirely new direction. Rather, the aim is for a common
> understanding of shared goals that might be helpful in our communications
> within the community and beyond.
>
> So, what might this look like?
>
> Image: http://wstaw.org/m/2014/09/19/A_possible_vision.png
>
> * Desktop at the center.
> * Frameworks as enabler.
> * Continue creating highly capable applications and even better integration.
> * "Simple by default, powerful when needed" applications
> [http://goo.gl/uNlpq3]. Make applications look and work great with
> excellent, high-quality functionality and consistent, effective, beautiful
> design. Be ambitious. Do not be shy about being best-in-class; see Krita!
> * Extend application capabilities by exposing desktop and other
> applications’ functions.
> * Expose application capabilities to make the desktop more powerful .
> * Examples:
> * Sessions and Activities
> * Saving and sharing desktop and application configurations.
> * Searchable application datastores.
> * Secure sharing of data between applications.
> * Sensible laptop touch screen support in applications.
> * Unified theming
> * Common design language and more effective HIG
> * Enable applications to take advantage of device-enabled desktop
> capabilities like location awareness, device streaming, device-as-input,
> etc. (see below)
> * Enable applications to take advantage of cloud-enabled desktop
> capabilities like beyond-the-desktop-search, collaboration, mapping, etc.
> (see below)
> * Securely expose common application functions to the desktop or other
> applications (kinda like Android Intents). Make it first class, visible.
> * More?
> * Highly capable integration with devices
> * Don’t just duplicate. Make each better.
> * Examples:
> * Shared clipboard
> * Shared notifications
> * Shared browsing
> * Media control (music, video, slideshows, pointer)
> * Send picture between device and desktop
> * Make or receive phone calls from the desktop
> * Desktop location awareness using device.
> * Desktop keyboard/mouse for device input/control
> * Remote camera
> * Browse and transfer files/library
> * Stream music/video between device and desktop
> * Send desktop audio to bluetooth speakers
> * Send desktop video to TV (e.g. chromecast)
> * Device as additional input or display (e.g. games,
> touchscreen-as-touchpad, device sensors like microphone, accelerometer,
> gyroscope, ambient light sensor, etc.)
> * Remote access to desktop capabilities and services
> * More?
> * Many of these examples are already in KDE Connect and may well be on
> its (or others’) road map to build deep, powerful desktop-wide integration.
> * Highly capable integration with cloud services
> * Don’t just duplicate. Make it better.
> * Examples:
> * Synced offline email, contacts, calendar
> * Beyond-the-desktop search/query (App repositories, OpenStreetMap,
> TVDB, MovieDB, Last.fm, DBpedia, dictionary, translation)
> * Integrated map/directions to contact address
> * More discoverable cloud file storage, browsing and syncing
> * Web apps as first-class applications on the desktop
> * (Properly) Integrated social network contact, group and event info
> * Sharing to social networks from anywhere
> * Easier sharing of customizations.
> * Group text/video chat
> * In-app collaboration
> * App-driven usability metrics and surveys
> * Remote git-based workflows
> * Seamlessly access and play cloud-stored music in my desktop music
> player
> * Synched media activity (ratings, play count, times, etc.)
> * More?
> * Many of these examples we already have in place, are working on, or
> have the basics in place to build deeper, even more powerful desktop-wide
> integration. These include Kontact, dictionary and translate runners and
> plasmoids, Marble, KIO, web view plasmoid, KPeople +WebAccounts,
> Share-Like-Connect, KTE Collaborative, Amarok, Tomahawk and more.
> * Quality
> * Applicable to design, code, documentation and translations.
> * Pride of workmanship. Encourages adoption. Encourages contribution.
>
> Collapsed down to 5 top-level items for conciseness: Desktop at the center.
> Frameworks as enabler. Highly capable integrated applications. Highly
> capable integration with devices and the cloud. Quality.
> ________________
>
>
> So, how might we preserve what has already been accomplished and tackle what
> comes next? Here is my personal interpretation of Cornelius Schumacher's
> advice from his keynote.
> * Be free
> * Bias support towards free-er platforms
> * Bias support towards open standards. Open standards lead to free-er
> platforms.
> * But don’t be shy about supporting people (us) where their (our)
> ecosystem is. Taking advantage of existing platforms may have a significant
> impact to people who stand to benefit most. It may also help to form the
> foundations upon which to create and support open standards and free-er
> platforms of the future with greater capability. Knowing the greater goal is
> crucial, but effective strategy (correctness*commitment) is what moves us
> toward that goal.
> * Bias towards working in the open to encourage participation and
> preserve sustainability.
> * Maintain our purpose
> * Give people access to great technology.
> * By our own users’ measure, we make a fantastic desktop environment and
> applications. We can do even better by giving people access to the greater
> capabilities of a technological ecosystem that includes the desktop and
> applications as full-fledged, relevant and highly capable participants that
> can make other elements in that ecosystem better.
> * Have fun
> * We get to participate in the exciting new and emerging elements of our
> technological ecosystem.
> * We make the best desktop environment and applications even kooler!
>
> There are probably a million holes to poke through this. Maybe it’s too
> ambitious. Maybe it’s much too limited. Maybe it’s entirely the wrong focus.
> Ultimately, it’s fine if we end up choosing a different approach than the
> one considered here. The hope though is for a clear, unambiguous focus that
> acknowledges our strengths as well as the reality of the trends in our
> technological ecosystem. I just wanted to share this collection of thoughts
> that have been festering in mah noggin since Akademy in the hopes it might
> be helpful to a community I’ve come to treasure.
>
> Hope this helpful and I'm genuinely happy to be a part of such an amazing
> community,
> Andrew Lake
> KDE VDG member
--
regards / pozdrawiam, Jaroslaw Staniek
Kexi & Calligra & KDE | http://calligra.org/kexi | http://kde.org
Qt for Tizen | http://qt-project.org/wiki/Tizen
Qt Certified Specialist | http://www.linkedin.com/in/jstaniek
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