Plus One Gnome Insightful
About Canonical’s contributions in the Gnome project…
Dylan McCall said:
This whole thing is really putting forwards an issue Gnome has right now: they can’t, as a community, decide whether they like the idea of external projects building new environments on the Gnome platform. (Case in point: Meego for netbooks).
I think there’s one camp that thinks Gnome should be a user-facing product, with its own special branding and its own distinctive look that everything ships in pristine condition. (I’ll inject my opinion in brackets here: I think that entirely defeats the purpose of having multiple distributions).
Then there’s another camp that sees Gnome as a starting point with lots of handy tools (and common modules) for distributions to build operating systems. For example, Unity, Meego, Jolicloud, UNR…
That first camp sees Gnome as a monolithic project; only internal work is worthy. The latter camp sees Gnome as something akin to Gnu.
Sorry for posting the whole thing, but I thought this comment needed to be made more widely.
Thanks for the bump, Martin!
Now I’m re-reading that, there’s one thing I missed (it being a fairly hastily written blog comment): I definitely don’t think either camp is wrong; they just have different opinions on who the Gnome community is. I think there should be a real discussion about what Gnome represents and what the implications are.
Are the entities who would like to see GNOME be a set of technologies to build on instead of a monolithic deliverable contributing significantly to those central technologies.. or are they just building on top of them?
It doesn’t matter which camp you are in. Both camps agree that Gnome does have a set of central technologies. Even if you are in the camp that wants to build on those and differentiate..those core technologies..inside the boundaries of the GNOME Project still must exist..and require care and feeding.
-jef
Jef: And amazingly we have some of the worlds best carers. Does it matter particularly who they’re employed by so long as the distributions recognise the need for maintenance? Core libs like gtk seem to get a lot of maint, dbus gets a lot of different maint. Very core tech that, not ignored.
Gnome shell, that’s what is kicking off. Lots of non-ubuntu peeps want economic resources for it to be pushed along, there just isn’t the economic case for it. Resort to social cases instead: it’s Canonical’s _duty_ to look after a part of Gnome that they don’t appreciate, use or consider to be the right direction. Red Hat has so much more _pride_ in the Gnome project because of the size of it’s commitment, and so on.
I would imagine that Red Hat engineers take pride in all their upstream project contributions they do from the kernel up into gnome. I’m not sure why they wouldn’t.
Duty? No I wouldn’t expect any corporate entity to actually have a social concious so I wouldn’t expect any to feel a sense of duty to do anything.
But in this case, Gnome is what is is because of what the _contributors_ want it to be. If Canonical isn’t there working as part of a consensus effort to maintain the framework of technologies to build on, then they’ll have to maintain more and more of it on their own as it diverges as a project.
No one is asking Canonical to contribute to Shell specifically..There are many other modules inside the Gnome project definition that would not suffer from additional attention and that Canonical relies on still. If they are willing to let others do the work and maintain those framework pieces, then they’ll have to live with the interests of those others in what their vision of the Gnome Project is meant to be and provide. It’s difficult to have a grand sweeping vision and not be active in driving the roadmap of the framework that you are building your vision on. The framework can and will walk away from your vision.
-jef
Preaching to the choir about the economic relatedness of vision and direction there jeff. Of course I’d love for Canonical to not spend so much money on Launchpad and move more into infrastructure (not gnome though, I have a bias) there are plenty of things that could be made that would make the entire FDO stack stronger and more robust. But of course either we’re talking to businesses that want features or programmers that can’t see the wood for the trees.
Anyway, Canonical will assess where it’s money is better spent. More folly to them to not make sure their suppliers are supported appropriately. But then again I think a lot of this has been nonsense driven by a couple of people who are emotional and tribal. And you can’t tell me they don’t exist, I heard some of the Red Hat folks at a Gnome Conf, even my granny doesn’t hold that much venom.
Once we all have google neural implants the emotion governor software will prevent overheated reactions and the reaction to those reactions.
How many different external opinions about Canonical’s contribution strategy will it take for this to no longer be viewed as a tribal reaction? RedHatters
aren’t the only people who have expressed a concern over Canonical’s lack of involvement in the stack.
A year from now, when Canonical finally and ultimately forks its desktop offering away from gnome instead of relying on gnome 3 all of this will be moot as there will no longer be an expectation that Canonical would need to contribute code back into gnome at all.
Jef: Is all this was expressed concern then we would have less froffy mouthed trolls and more serious debate about very specific instances, pieces of code and part of the system. The conversations aren’t meaningful right now and the only thing I’ve seen of interest has been this insight into the internal conflict with gnome’s self perception.
I have my concerns, but I’m more concerned with Red Hat’s lack of involvement in the user community, it’s disregard for marketing or design. Red Hat is riding on the coattails of Ubuntu and if not corporately then Fedora and Gnome certainly are… see how easy it is to pick some slight thing and not say anything specific and express concerns?
I want to see data and I want to see specific instances, Jeff your better than the trolls you do actually sometimes say interesting things and tend not to get sucked into the drama of it. On this case though I think you may have succumbed to bias.
wow, so much name calling.
We are all biased. I’m biased. You are biased. Shuttleworth is biased. The “Gregs” of the world are biased. To continually point out that someone who disagrees with your world view has a bias is to speak the obvious.
But moving on… I think mairin duffy’s sidebar discussion with Mark about the evolution of design in the GNOME space in greg’s followup blog which rebutts the tribalism argument speaks to some of what you want in terms of specifics about red hat’s involvement in design historically. She even has included publicly archived mailing list discussion references that date back to 2004 about the evolution of GNOME design and a personal take on her involvement as a Red Hatter in the GNOME 3 design process. I not sure I can reconcile her historic publicly archived references and your conjecture that somehow GNOME and by extension Fedora is riding Ubuntu’s design coattails. I’ve no reason to discount her statements or her publicly archived references which support what she is saying. If you have some publicly archived discussion which supports your argument, I’m more than happy to read them.
-jef
I wasn’t actually making a statement but an example.