GNOME Quick SWOT Analysis, april 2010

Products

Values

Teams

[desktop]
[platform]
[mobile]
[free]

[usable]
[accesible]
[international]
[developer-friendly]
[organized]
[community]
[state-of-art]

[developers]
[accessibility]
[designers]
[translators]
[documentation]
[marketing]
[QA]
[foundation board]
[admins]
[release]

Strengths

Weaknesses

• Free Software. [free]
• GNOME brand is known in the FLOSS world. [community]
• Talented community. [community]
• Superb middleware technology. [platform]
• Rock solid releases. [organized]
• HIG [usable]
• Delivered by the major distributions. [supported]
• Economic support from companies through the Advisory Board. [supported]
• Lots of consulting resources available. [supported]
• Easy for companies to use and incorporate. [organized, supported]
• Good internalization support. [international]
• Good Accessibility support. [accesible]
• Adequate infrastructure for development (bugzilla, git, etc).
• Support for several programming languages. [mission][platform][developer-friendly]
• Key component of Sugar: revolutionary education project. [community][platform]
• GNOME 3.0 is going to be great !!!. [organized]

• There isn't a clear decision-making body in GNOME for marking the direction of the project. [organized][community]
  • The Release Team has taken this sort-of this role on the GNOME 3 conception.
• Unstructured, and some times incomplete or not updated information. [organized][community]
  • Difficult to implement wide-project management.
    • There a lot of good roadmaps, goals, etc scattered on http://live.gnome.org, but there no synchronization between them, no priorities, and difficult to connect.
  • This is a block stopper for some ways of collaboration
    • Collaboration between different teams is not encourage by the infrastructure, it is more a matter of personal contacts
  • The [developer] community don't see the point of reporting status to the Release Team (by now, this is the only project wide management team)
  • New developers find tough to join/contribute because they don't figure out how the information is structured.
  • Planet GNOME seems to be the only way to have a project-wide point of view of activities. It is scattered with other kind of personal information not related to GNOME.
• The current roadmap process is too much focused on the evolution of the modules. It is based on their maintainers opinions. It is good, in general, for planning incremental or localised changes, but is not so good for more radical or general changes. [organized]
• Delegation of decisions to third parties. [organized][community]
  • We have delegated brand awareness & UI innovation to distributions rather than taking this on as a GNOME challenge and letting distributions be mere aggregators of our work.
  • Moblin, Maemo, Sugar, UNR, things like Compiz, Clutter, and even our delegation of decisions on things like web browsers/engines, Mono, photo management & music management applications & more have all lead to GNOME being a much smaller factor in deciding what the GNOME user experience will be than, say, what Ubuntu, Red Hat or Novell decides to ship to their users.
• Key areas like a11y depend heavily on the support from companies. [organized]
• APIs and ABIs breakages have no a predictable cadence. [organized]
• GTK+ is not attracting media/developer focus. [platform][developer-friendly]
  • No branding policy across certified bindings and websites.
  • perceived as old, ugly or difficult by new programmers
  • Lack of fancy features like multitouch.
  • No official installers for win32 or macosx
  • No guidelines about development environments and workflows (anjuta, eclipse, emacs, mondevelop, etc), good for newbies
  • Documentation:
    • too much centered on the API (this can be generalized to the documentation of other GNOME libraries and technologies)
    • poor in comparison with Qt.
  • Bindings are separated projects.
  • Unbalanced support for different bindings.
• GTK+ is the only component from the GNOME stack to be widely known outside of the project. Consequently, it is our competence factor. [platform]
• Uncertain balance between stability and innovation. [desktop][platform][supported][state-of-art]
• Some of the core values of GNOME are very poorly represented on the current state of the project [organized][developer-friendly][mobile]
• GNOME have large deployments on schools (eg. Andalusia or Extremadura in Spain) although but we don't encourage the development of educational tools [community]

Opportunities

Threats

• Aspire to be the platform of choice for opportunistic desktop developers. [platform][developer-friendly][state-of-art]
• Be elegible for Corporate deployments. [supported][desktop]
• Mobile computing. [supported][desktop][state-of-art]
  • ARM devices are getting popular.
  • Bring together developers and companies using GNOME technologies.
• The combination of technologies going under the name "HTML 5" have made/are making web technology based applications finally competitive with those built using conventional toolkits such as GTK+. This mean we need to bring modern and solid web technologies to the heart of GNOME. [state-of-art]
  • WebKitGTK+.
  • JS and CSS.
• Integration with cloud computing. [state-of-art]
  • Twitter/Identica tools (managing multiple accounts and multiple users).
  • Accounting.
  • Snowy.
  • Facebook integration.
• Hosting web services. [community]
  • Snowy.
  • iFolder
  • it could be a self-sustaining model to raise money for the hosting and GNOME, and provide Free as in Freedom services for users in the bargain.
• Be receptive to the requests from projects that use GNOME.[community]
  • Sugar: improve support for Pyhton and JS, offer app functionality through shared lib (like Evince).
• Try to encourage companies to work upstream. [community]
• LiMo could be a candidate for advisory board.
• Hackfests like the recently celebrated on London about UX generated a lot of _enthusiasm_ on the GNOME community and it attracted a lot media focus. We must take measures for keeping the momentum and take advantage of this. We must explore ways of better collaboration flows between developers, designers, writers, etc. [community][organized]

• Microsoft Windows dominates in the desktop computer market with 92%. [supported][desktop]
• No evident winner as the free desktop alternative. [supported][desktop]
• Qt has been declared as the facto standard in mobile computing by major role players (Symbian and MeeGo). Mobile programming is a emerging area that is attracting programmers. [supported][desktop]
• Mobile community using GNOME components is not well connected. [organized]
• Cloud computing can move some services from desktop services to the cloud. [state-of-art]
• Loss of potential new developers, especially for negative GTK+ perception. [platform][developer-friendly][state-of-art][community]
• APIs and ABIs changes no scheduled in enough advance can impact negatively downstream and consequently, our final users. [supported][desktop][platform][community]
• Some companies created around GNOME are more focused on certain technologies created on the project that on the project itself. [supported][community]
• Some companies using GNOME technologies are not participating in the community because they don't know how or don't see the advantage. [community]