Gnome Summit (@MIT)
For this year’s gnome summit I decided to attend. I wanted to see what was going on and keep in touch with various people in the FOSS community. While I’m not a gnome hacker myself, I have made gnome apps, plugins and know some of the people working on new things.
So interesting things I learned at this summit, firstly I’d like to appologise because my sleeping pattern went wrong this weekend so I didn’t attend as many of the summit sessions as I wanted. But the session about Gnome Shell was interesting and it’s good to see people working on things that scratch their itches.
Gnome Shell, looks very cool but need more time to finish, it does require GLX so older computers without 3DFX will probably not be able to use Gnome Shell at all. Hopefully when Ubuntu M comes out we’ll have figured out a way to keep the support for older P4 computers that we use for refurbishing here.
Miguel de Icaza was there on Saturday and while I didn’t at first recognise him, I think he may have recognised me. So while we got into an argument about the relevance of mono’s moonlight implementation without the Microsoft PlaySure DRM components (i.e. Netflix), he did at least give me a hug and appologise for calling me a douche later. So we can all have ideologically different perspectives and still be human beings.
Fedora, there were some people from Fredora/Red Hat there and there was some very interesting casual conversations about the perspective that the Hat communities have on the Ubuntu community. They are disappointed with the level of respect that upstreams get from Canonical and by extension the Ubuntu community.
Communities seem to be a really strong theme for a few people. I think the Ubuntu LoCo community is showing up the more programmer centric communities as we’re not able to program but we are able to interact with none technical people, organise events and advocate for Free and Open Source Software in a much bigger way than Gnome, Fedora or others. I think some of these projects may spawn community projects of their own, and when they do I will look forward to working with those groups in my area.
Ubuntu had a showing at the Gnome Summit, there was a handful of people from Canonical Desktop Experience team there (2 or 3) and there was me from the community, but other than that it was a fairly anti-Ubuntu crowd. I got criticised for being naive that I was spending my time working for Canonical for free (Ubuntu and Canonical are the same thing apparently) and that the Red Hat guys couldn’t understand why anyone would want to work on Ubuntu at all, since Canonical is playing silly bastards with upstreams.
I think this backlash is coming from the notify-osd interaction, the fact that patches are not welcome downstream and that Canonical folks have been rumoured to have been instructed by Mark Shuttleworth to not engaged in upstreams at all. There is a deep mistrust of Mark and Canonical, their motives and their methods, some warranted, others based on hearsay and political culture (pure capitalists don’t like companies to not have shares apparently).
The gnome fear is that Ubuntu will completely fork Gnome, or will have to because of all the modifications which are being either hidden from upstreams or are diverging from any sort of consensus. The perception of arrogance of both emerging camps and how they’re moving forwards is interesting.
There was an interesting argument that went along the lines of “There is a finite number of developers, if all the really good ubuntu developers are all hired by Canonical and Canonical starts to go in a direction that the community doesn’t want to follow in, even if it’s possible to fork, where will the talent come from to maintain it?”. It was an interesting hypothetical situation.
Now I’m not totally convinced of everything I’ve reported here, so don’t comment to me about how wrong I am to listen to obviously biased sources. I’m reporting it because it’s interesting and like all human conflict can be put out of perspective very easily. Take these casual observations with a grain or two of salt, because I don’t think the FOSS world is about to break apart in any major way.
Tags: gnome, gtk, linux, mit, summit, Ubuntu
I’m betting those comments orginate from indicator-session than from notify-osd. They’re still upset that we didn’t use their codebase for it.
I think another interesting question is that if RedHat writes GNOME Shell and makes it the default for GNOME, and no other distro besides Fedora can use it (because of some of the issues you mention), what happens to GNOME?
Are we able to get some actual examples of Canonicals upstream misbehavings? I keep hearing this bantered around a lot, but more often than not it seems to be quite simply “we don’t get enough code and devs from Canonical/Ubuntu”… an attitude which generally ignores the packaging work done for Ubuntu, the bug work done in Ubuntu etc.
I’m actually interested… because if Canonical is causing problems with upstream, it is definitely something we need to work on as the Ubuntu community. But yer… I’d really like to see some examples of these issues.
If the desktop experience people were instructed not to work with upstreams, then they are doing a poor job of it with KDE. All of the DX code the runs in the default Kubuntu installation for Karmic is already in KDE svn.
I would say that notify-osd development is not the most accurate start of a timeline when looking at the souring of the relationship between Canonical an GNOME. The work Canonical paid for to integrate downstream presence patches against an obsolete gdm 2.20 codebase last summer (prior to any notify-osd development) is probably a better starting point if you want to understand the dynamic.
Notify-osd may be controversial as it duplicates existing functionality to some extent… in the same way that Moblin’s conman is controversial. But when I spot checked the per application patches, Canonical seemed to be doing a reasonably good job of submitting application specific patches to upstream application projects.
But I really have to wonder… how much of the downstream work that Canonical has done to customize the GNOME 2.x desktop is going to have to be discarded within the next year as the GNOME shell and Moblin interfaces mature.
With all due respect to everyone involved, Ubuntu / Canonical is the best thing that ever happened to Gnome.
Ubuntu brought them more users, more testing, and we filter the bugs before they go upstream, and the actual bugs do go upstream.
The first thing a contributor is instructed to do is send our code up to Debian to decrease the deltas. I can’t get a change approved by an MOTU without first showing I sent it to Debian.
These people clearly have no idea how Ubuntu works.
Perhaps there are a lot of GNOME contributors from Ubuntu who choose not to (or aren’t required to) mention Canonical and Ubuntu on everything they do. Ubuntu drives contributions in a lot of places /other/ than paid developers.
It will be interesting to see what Canonical does with their new stuff if / when GNOME Shell rolls about.
Thanks for the update, Owen
Why the hell did I just call you Owen? Ugh, long day. I meant Martin. Sorry
I heard a rumor that Mark Shuttleworth is actually Bill Gates in disguise… think about it! When do you ever see them both on-screen at the same time? When?!!!
Windows 7 is also just a rebranded Ubuntu 9.10. Mark/Bill said there would be a new theme. Windows 7 is it! Surprise!
Mark is actually a woman. There .. I blew the covers on that one. I hope the planet will now get technical again.
PS. In all fairness, Canonical is not really adhering to “upstream first”, but in FOSS you need to waste developer time and implement different things and then let evolution take its course.(The apollo project did the same thing, they had different teams working on the same problems and then picked the best solution. Certainly not cheap or efficient, but it works.)
Does it need to be technical again?
In fact I’ll post a blog entry as a poll.
I’m envious you got to go at all! Being an Ubuntu-boi i’d have felt a bit uncomfortable around such hostility, but do these grieprs not realise that whatever the issues at hand people -choose- to work on Ubuntu? Ubuntu never claims to be the perfect setup for making a distro and kinks are straightened out as you go along. With all of the (imo vital) changes Ubuntu are pushing and bringing to the desktop stack of course not everyone is going to be happy but Ubuntu has to do what’s best for Ubuntu first and foremost or it’s just another pretty Debian derivative with a theme…
K, i’ve gone off on a tangent here. Well done for going though Martin!
It’s a shame that the new notify-osd is a source (or excuse) for bad blood between Ubuntu and Gnome, especially since the notify-osd is one of the best usability improvements Ubuntu has developed.
I absolutely love the fact that I no longer feel the urge to compulsively click every notification that pops up, and can just get on with whatever I’m doing.
I take minor issue with the assertion that lack of 3D support is a real blocker for gnome-shell. We have (or are really close to) functional free 3D drivers for basically all ATI, Intel, and NVIDIA hardware for the past ten years. The AGP slot, you’ll recall, debuted on Pentium II motherboards.
The only reasonably modern graphics chipset where GLX literally can’t be supported in hardware is the AMD Geode. We don’t have a decent driver for many VIA chips, but that seems to be as much about lack of interest as anything else. There’s an argument for modernizing the drivers for some older kit like Matrox and S3 Savage, and I’d be happy to see that happen. But in deployment share terms, we’re talking about 95% coverage in free drivers in the next six months. I have trouble considering that a problem.
In your Apollo analog for FOSS who are the decision-makers who get to make the hard choices as to which technical solution is best for the overall program mission? For Apollo it was central NASA management…and central management is exactly what we do not have in FOSS.
I have a very amateur question but… Did Canonical propose notify-osd for GNOME inclusion yet?
“We have (or are really close to) functional free 3D drivers for basically all ATI, Intel, and NVIDIA hardware for the past ten years”
Is that so? Judging by my 2 or 3 years old HP nc6400 laptop, I don’t think that you can count all ATi cards of the last 10 years as “3D supported by fglrx”. The Mobility Radeon X1300 in this laptop lost fglrx support in Jaunty, and the free driver’s 3D performance is insufficient for desktop effects.
Thanks, ATI!
why don’t just FOSS follow Ubuntu’s lead. its obvious that they have a good vision and they are going somewhere with it, and everyone can see that Ubuntu is a new distribution that became the most popular distribution in a little time.
so my advice would be to collaborate with Ubuntu so they can make the next big thing, or just keep that nonsense problems and let Steve Ball laugh at us.
No, as far as I am aware no one has proposed Notify OSD for inclusion in GNOME.