Swapnil: You recently took over the role of Gnome Release Manager at the time when Gnome is going through a major transition. What challenges are there for the Gnome team?
Peters: Well, the transition people talk about is mostly technical, from metacity/gnome-panel to gnome-shell, and while it was quite something, I think we are handling it fine, and that’s because at it heart, we didn’t change, the people of GNOME are still the same, and they still aspire to the same thing; building great, and free, softwares for our users.
But still, talking about transitions, a major challenge is not to get insulated developing for standalone computers as people are more and more using online services (and too often losing sight of the freedoms they deserve). In this aspect I have to applaud the work initiated by our KDE friends with the ownCloud project, not only it is good software, on par with closed ones, but it gives back control to the users, while giving the possibility for companies to offer hosting of those services.