Last week, Lanedo sent me to GUADEC, the GNOME developers and users conference. As you may have read elsewhere, the conference was wonderfully organized, with splendid weather, gorgeous food and awesome people.
But there was a strange feeling amongst participants. Was it the last GUADEC? What is the future of the GNOME project? Xan López and Juan José Sánchez suggested to ship a tablet with GNOME in 2014. But isn’t that too late? Is it really useful?
Is this the end of the world, the end of the road?
What is the goal of GNOME?
The first question we may ask ourselves is “What is our goal? What do we want to offer to users?”. To this question, the answer from Jon McCann was straightforward:
We want to offer freedom to anyone that want it.
This makes a lot of sense. What are the dominant platforms those days? Apple, where your only freedom is spending money. Android, which is slightly more free but heavily linked to Google services. Ubuntu is a rising platform but, if it looks more free than Android, it is heavily linked to a private company. A freedom oriented solution is needed.
As Lennart Poettering pointed out, we should forget about the “Desktop environment” thing. Even if they use Linux, Android, Ubuntu and even Tizen are OSes. So should be GNOME.
What is freedom anyway?
But it would be a mistake to take freedom for granted because your operating system is completely open-source. Are you free if you use gNewSense with Gmail, Google calendar, Google contacts and Dropbox?
You could install OwnCloud somewhere, try to configure your phone to access it after installing a custom ROM. Then cry because you don’t have all the nice features of the closed world, when everybody is live-sharing pictures during an event. And abandon your freedom the day your server crashes and you realize your last backup is months old.
Today, freedom is not only about the code that runs on your computer. It is about all the online services you are connected to, all the servers that host your data.
The solution: a freasy network
Online freedom is only achievable through decentralization. GNOME’s purpose is to offer freedom to anyone that want it. Discussing with Karen Sandler, I came to the conclusion that GNOME should not only offer an OS, it should offer decentralized online services.
You would be able to install GNOME in server mode or in client mode. In server mode, it would be required to have a DNS pointing to your server. You will configure it through simple wizards. Then, you will be able to add accounts. Each user will be identified by an unique email address but, of course, a GNOME server could host multiple domains.
When logging on your client, you will enter your mail address and your password. Automatically, emails, calendar, XMPP, files, contacts will be synchronized. And erased at logoff if you want.
You would also be able to migrate your data from one server to another in one step. Best of all: we could offer to encrypt data so even GNOME servers administrators cannot access it. What about built-in support for TOR, making GNOME a true freedom and private cloud OS?
All of this should be dead simple, else we would loose lost of potential users. It’s not because you are not an engineer that you cannot expect freedom. GNOME should be freasy: free and easy.
Apps, the key to success
The key to success for a platform those days is having a lot of apps. Why would apps creators invest in GNOME, after Android and iOS?
Because we can offer a level of integration never seen before. With technologies such as Telepathy tubes, XMPP, DBus, developing an online application for GNOME would be as easy as writing a desktop application. Instead of writing your server application, your web interface, your web API, your Android application, you only write one server app and one client app which communicate through DBus.
Apps creators should also fear Apple and Google dominant positions. Apple proved that they can delete an application from the store without any comment. The day Google decides to enter your business and develop an application similar to yours, you are doomed. They will propose better integration with all their services. Ultimately, apps creator need a free ecosystem.
Cooperation
Most of the relevant pieces of technologies are already available like XMPP servers, LDAP, mail and calendaring servers. But, as the Fritalk.com administrator, I know that putting all the pieces together is very hard. Also, some pieces are still missing, like a good decentralized social network.
But lot of projects are already tackling the issue, each from their own perspective: Mozilla launched a mobile OS, LibreOffice is working on an online version, KDE has OwnCloud, there’s FreedomBox. In what sense are they different? I’ve the feeling that their ultimate goal is exactly the same as ours: offering freedom to those who want it.
As such, it doesn’t make sense to compete against each other. It is time to join forces, to make compromises on design and technological choices, to offer an unified solution, at least in the early days.
We are those who care about freedom, privacy, independence, data ownership. It’s our duty to make it freasy.
The A freasy future for GNOME by Lionel Dricot, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Belgium License.
About a server version of Gnome: I’m completely agree with you, Ploum.
But more than a simple mode of the OS, it would be an app. An app to manage easily server services for Web, XMPP, email, LDAP, etc… . This app should not be more complicated to use than Gmail or Facebook.
And, as GTK can run on web browser, we can have a Gnome Server on a little box without screen and without Xorg.
It could be a good project.
That’s a great vision… Big fan of online service I’m myself trying to start to setup my own server for music, photos, documents, backup… For mail and calendar google still beat existing options by far.
I have limited experience in OS programming, but I would love to work on one of these services (ie server+client apps). What are the entry points ?
Not sure if I should be happy or not by that news.
Sure these are great ideas. I’d love to run that system on my mobile phone/tablet if it succeed.
But WHAT ABOUT MY PC ??? I like GNOME and still want to be able to use it on my archlinux (which I like even more). GNOME OS on mobiles devices, why not but don’t forget the “We want to offer freedom to anyone that want it”. I want freedom on my laptop.
If GNOME wants to be an OS what happens to Fedora?
@fedora :
please, read this: http://afaikblog.wordpress.com/2012…
“You could install OwnCloud somewhere, try to configure your phone to access it after installing a custom ROM.”
As far as I know you don’t need a custom ROM to access ownCloud. Heck, you don’t even need to install it yourself, companies are already offering ownCloud hosting (cf. https://owncloud.com/partner )
“KDE has OwnCloud”
That is wrong: ownCloud was started by KDE people, but it is not tied to KDE. It is a web service after all: GNOME applications would be more than welcome to integrate with ownCloud. I think this is an area were we could collaborate.
@mart-e : I don’t feel like it targets a gnome OS, rather a GNOME cloud with all super and FOSS services for all.
@Aurélien Gâteau : I guess the problem is not to use one cloud or another but rather to be able to deploy your own cloud for you and your own community (family, friends…).
@MisterP : you can deploy ownCloud yourself if you have your own server. Distributions have also started to package it.
@Aurélien Gâteau :
It’s already required: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug…
Decentralized online services? YES! That would make me/linux community very interested in Gnome.
“Apps creators should also fear Apple and Google dominant positions.”
should be :
“Apps creators should also fear Gnome infinitesimal position and the complete lack of perspective apart not decline anymore.”
One more time it is just an overoptimistic and nombrilist point of view about the technologic world that really don’t care to the microscopic Gnome team. The resume of all the different Gnome communications is : we have been unable to manage the past, but you can trust us to build the future… I am not convince, yet !
So I guess making the Gnome Desktop sane again and stop removing features (last victim was Nautilus), is out of the question?
Really? Freedom for everyone?
That’s almost more vague than “a community that makes great software”.
Actually, it is more vague. Because it doesn’t spell out what freedom. Freedom from choice?
Freedom from good software.
>As such, it doesn’t make sense to compete against each other. It is time to join forces, to make compromises on design and technological choices, to offer an unified solution, at least in the early days.
I completely agree here. As other already said ownCloud is not a KDE project. It is the decentralized platform you are looking for. So lets join forces, integrate ownCloud tightly into GNOME so that user can either install their own ownCloud (most distrtibutions are providing packages these days) or choose one of the many service providers. To enjoy freedom and control over their data while having all this (contacts, calendar, files, music,…) integrated tightly into their desktop environment.
There is no need to re-invent the wheel. Start now with what exist today!
FOR CRYING OUT LOUD! The GNOME community JUST DOESN’T GET IT!
Us users don’t want GNOME to provide “online services” or whatever the buzzword-of-the-day is. We don’t want to run GNOME on our tablets or phones; Android or iOS are far superior options. We surely don’t want to run a crippled, portable-oriented desktop environment on our traditional workstations!
What we want out of GNOME is a desktop environment that:
1) Does only what it needs to in order to allow us to use our computers more efficiently, and stays out of the way otherwise.
2) Doesn’t impose stupid decisions some so-called “UI design expert” mistakenly thought were good ideas.
3) Performs well.
4) Isn’t full of bugs.
GNOME 2 offered all of that, which is why it became popular. GNOME 3, on the other hand, is the complete opposite, and that’s why it failed.
@JonnyBoy : Yeah let’s do what wev’e in the past and stick on that because it’s surely the best way to evolve and go toward the future: tradition ! Developers from the last millennium knew everything and we should all go back and use only terminal…
So much wrong in such comments. On the other hand, I love how people are good are critics. Anyway I’ll stop and we’ll move too close to the Goodwin point.
Gnome OS ? As describe on LinuxFR (in a summary of the GUADEC), it is only a test platform, only for developers.
I don’t think it is a good idea to make another OS on desktop (seen like one more Linux distribution again) neither on mobile (Tizen, Firefox OS, Meego reborn (see Mer), openWebOs… there already are a lot of OSes full of freedom !).
This is not the place of Gnome. But, there is a need of integration, that’s true.
And remember something : as long as something isn’t pre-installed, it isn’t used. Mozilla understood it and made a lot of accords with constructor and network operator for Firefox OS, which means that they have a chance to see their OS used despite the giants Android and iOS.