[kde-community] Summary so far regarding the alternative/focused draft

[Olivier Churlaud]

Hi,

First sorry to break the thread, I'm only receiving the digests.

Since I'm fairly new to the community I didn't want to interfere in the 
discussion, that I find quite interesting.
By reading it please consider this fact that I'm new here (~ 1 year)
I answered below in the summary.. I tried to keep it short but... :D

Le 12/02/2016 22:03, kde-community-request at kde.org a écrit :
> Date: Fri, 12 Feb 2016 21:52:22 +0100
> From: Alexander Neundorf<neundorf at kde.org>
>
>
> I'll try to summarize the points (as much as I can remember) which have been
> made wrt. to the alternative vision draft
> (https://community.kde.org/KDE/VisionDraftA).
>
> 1) There was the argument that some things which exist in KDE do not match the
> 4 items mentioned, e.g. a git-mirroring tool (or something like that).
>
> - How about extending item 4 "A cross-platform Software Development Kit" to
> not only talk about libraries, but also other development tools ?
> While I see those naturally as supporting the items mentioned in our draft, I
> wouldn't mind mentioning them explicitely.
>
> - the 4 items mentioned are the stuff where we see the focus, the emphasis,
> the core. This doesn't mean stuff which does not exactly fit into that is
> automatically "excluded". Should we change the wording somehow ?
In all this discussion every time I read this argument, I thought about 
WikiToLearn. Well, if you read the posts on PlanetKDE, it's one of the 
most welcoming sub-community. People come and stick to KDE because they 
met this team.

I think that even if it's not what I expected to see in KDE (it's 
web-based), I was quite happy to see how beneficial it was for our 
standing. I would have been sad that such a project might have been refused.

> 2) There was the argument that focussing on GUI software is too narrow, since
> it neglects CLI or future non-graphical user interfaces.
> I think we should keep KDE focused on software with graphical user interfaces.
> IMO that's enough territory to cover.
As Martin Graeßlin said earlier in the conversation, I think this is 
dangerous. The future seems to be _also_ IoT. Things and programs you 
control by speech, or gestures. Not only clicking on (even nice) 
buttons. As we are good (or even expert?) in Qt, all this is "easily" 
reachable. Why not to use this capacity? If someone wanted to develop 
such a program with the GTK+ suite, (s)he  would have a rather hard 
time, whereas Qt already has libraries for this.

When I came first to KDE, it was *really* because it's a community that 
use Qt, and did most of the program I was using (desktop, music 
player...). Then I stayed because of the awesome community. And to me, 
what is KDE is not a type of products but really a way of behaving, of 
interacting together to construct something always nicer.

Being part of KDE is a way for projects to be seen by other people (if 
you are registred on PlanetKDE, then Phoronix, Slashdot and other speak 
about you), it's also a frame because *you* know how to do things, it's 
mentoring and above all, for the user, it is a label. "It's a KDE 
project, it means...." And our vision should be exactly that. The fact 
that the products have high quality and respect good values.

After that, I don't see the problem of hosting a new website, a speech 
recognizer, a cool terminal, music player, libraries, and why not the 
next Qt-Framework for building websites? Or whatever.  But of course, 
it's maybe a shift in the current goal of KDE.

> 3) Regarding "A complete set of cross-platform end-user applications", there
> was the question whether e.g. a gtk-application could also be a KDE
> application.
> Personally I'd like to keep the goal of providing consistent user interfaces
> etc. OTOH, if some gtk-application would really want to become a KDE project,
> they would probably want to follow our guidelines too. Currently this is not
> really explicitely excluded.
> What do you think ?
>
>
> 4) I guess we should make the opening statement (the actual vision) a bit
> shorter.
> Ideas ?
As some others already said, a vision _is_, whatever you think about it, 
a catchy, motivating and easy-to-remember motto. People should associate 
the brand name (KDE) with it. Like for Plasma, "Simple by default, 
powerful when needed". It's catchy, and people remember it. It's what 
KDE needs to sell its products AND its community. So that people want to 
join. I think you are mostly arguing about the mission. I already said 
above what I think about the content.
> 5) my personal, real motivation to work on free software, especially KDE, is
> actually to provide the basic software people need to manage their digital
> life (desktop, file manager, document reader and creator, web browser, email,
> etc.) as free software, so it is available as common goods for everybody, like
> stencil and paper, instead of having to pay for them and depend on the will of
> some company. RMS's "Right to Read" influenced me a lot.
>
> What did I miss ?
> Comments, suggestions ?
>
> Alex
Cheers,  and thx Alex for this summary.
Olivier