latest draft for mission (and strategy)

[Christian Mollekopf]

Hi,

I'm new on the list so sorry for not replying to the thread.

I was asked to contribute my feedback on the Vision/Mission, so here it
goes.

I like Vision and Mission-Statement and they generally reflect my values
as well. They are very inclusive and fairly loose, which I think is the
only reasonable thing for such a high-level statement, yet they still
establish some values, which is good.

Personally, the strategy points are not too relevant for me, so I'm not
going comment on the individual points (which I too find generally
agreeable, nothing in there goes against what I want to achieve), but
I'm going to comment on why they are not too important to me instead.

To me, KDE is not one project. We're a diverse bunch of people working
on a variety of projects with different goals and ideas. As such, as
much as I can agree with individual strategy points, those are
ultimately up to the individual projects and their people. Those
strategic decisions are always tradeoffs, and as such must be made on a
case by case basis. I think it's entirely fine for an application to
decide to not be translatable, or to only run on a certain platform,
these are decisions for the individual projects and people to make, and
sometime heavily depend on individual goals projects set for themselves.

The strategy points are fine examples how the vision *could* be pursued,
but that's all they are to me, so I think there is little point in
trying to fine tune them too much and I think they must not be treated
as rules of any sort.

Personally I'd like to see more great software produced by the KDE
community and not necessarily "KDE-software" (though that's also ok if
that's what you're interested in doing of course), so I like that
openness in the vision and the mission.

I realize though that I have a developer perspective and there is
perhaps a need for being more specific for the sake of creating more of
an identity, and to that end the strategy points perhaps explain the
mission better.

Cheers,
Christian