Vincent opened up the discussion by doing a long review of the proposal which was discussed on desktop-devel. The only controversial part of the proposal was the division of Core and Featured Applications.

GNOME summit speaker photo

There were two major objections: translators were worried about quality of translations and having to create a new account to patch or contribute to projects that aren't hosted on gnome.org. To address translator objections, r-t is working with translation teams to come up with a more stringent quality guidelines and processes for Featured Applications.

Ted Gould brought up his proposal from the mailing list to define a core GNOME desktop moduleset that doesn't include Shell so that Ubuntu can continue to say that they embrace GNOME. There was some disagreement about this and the conversation was postponed until tomorrow.

What happened next was, in a nutshell, a one and half hour long disagreement about the definition of Featured Applications, whether it makes sense to expend the energy on the delineation at all, and whether the designation has any value for GNOME and for the application receiving it. It would be too difficult to cover all aspects of this discussion among the eight parties whom were principally involved. And, since I was one of those parties, it wouldn't be entirely objective. However, there was some agreement and some things left unresolved.

In the category of agreement the following aspects were clear: the definition of GNOME is the Core and Platform modulesets and the wider GNOME infrastructure hosted and supported modules are—regardless of whatever else they are designated—at the very least GNOME Project. There was also agreement that we, as a project, want to promote good applications in our ecosystem, in the short term, and, in the long term, go the direction of something like an app. store.

With regard to areas of disagreement, the session ended without much conclusions, however, a discussion afterward between a few parties sounded optimistic and so we may see a way forward announced in the coming weeks.