dobey: Well first of all, this is what I get paid for within Sun, which *is* a distributor. We're trying to identify some of the missing pieces in the desktop - whether we have found them yet or not, only time will tell. I think your 'portable platform' isn't a terribly good argument - I hope you don't need any explanations of why this is so.

In the end though, we need to encourage people to innovate as much as bug fix. This is one of the most important things for getting new contributors to the desktop and keeping the project alive.