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I am, right now, attempting to publicly counter your incorrect perceptions. Others have also done so. See, for example, Jeff Waugh's excellent blog post on the matter.

And who are you? Are you an official spokesperson for the GNOME Foundation? A post on Slashdot by some random person doesn't equate to an official public pronouncement by the GNOME Foundation.

I am Shaun McCance. I have been an active Gnome developer since 2002, and a Foundation member since 2003. You can verify my membership on the Foundation Membership List. I maintain three packages in the desktop release and one in the developer tools, and I lead the Gnome Documentation Team.

Should you just take my word for it? Of course not. But I have pointed you to concrete facts, and that should be sufficient for you to at least attempt to do some real fact-checking, rather than posting unsubstantiated drivel.

It doesn't matter what the "facts" are with regard to his official position in GNOME. What matters is peoples' perceptions. And the real fact of the matter is that people associate Miguel with GNOME.

And when we tell you the facts, you ignore them. You keep making your assertions, which in turn sway people's perceptions. It's a Catch-22.

If the Foundation wants to convince everyone that Miguel does not have a hand in GNOME any more, then they need to publicly cast him out, denounce him, and announce that he no longer has any power with GNOME any more, and does not speak for them in any way. That's how you eliminate perceptions: you publicly counter them and state what the truth is. Instead, the GNOME foundation has done nothing at all to counter this perception.

I am, right now, attempting to publicly counter your incorrect perceptions. Others have also done so. See, for example, Jeff Waugh's excellent blog post on the matter.

And what would we cast Miguel out of? Would you have us revoke his Foundation membership? That's ridiculous. There are a lot of Foundation members who disagree with a lot of other Foundation members on a lot of topics. That's their right.

The interviewer asks some very good questions about the weak areas in Ubuntu-Canonical's business strategy and Shuttleworth has to dodge many questions and hide behind half-truths, handwaving and his usual marketing gobbledygook.

Ubuntu allegedly has a "policy of not doing our own software development, but only packaging what others have developed" -- with the few rare exceptions like the Upstart init system. Ubuntu-Canonical doesn't hire any top developers to do upstream development like some other commercial distros, Red Hat and Novell, do. For this precise reason, the GNOME hacker Jeff Waugh had to leave Ubuntu when he wanted to concentrate on developing GNOME.

Given this background, I'm inclined to believe that Shuttleworth is heavily distorting the reality when he claims that a lot of KDE 4 development is now happening inside of Ubuntu. This is one of the several points where I would have wished the interviewer to be a bit tougher and to push a bit harder in order to dig out the truth behind Shuttleworth's marketing talk. Of course, if Ubuntu-Canonical has indeed changed their policy lately and if they are now hiring KDE developers to do upstream development for KDE 4, then this revelation would have greatly added the news value of the interview. It's unfortunate that the interviewer didn't push this question (and some other questions) any further but, instead, left Shuttleworth's dubious claims open for speculations.

Reminds me of something Jeff Waugh had to say.

Reminds me of something Jeff Waugh had to say.

The Gconf/Windows registry comparison is wrong. The only thing is that it contains configuration data stored in one frontend. This interview with Havoc Pennington might clear up some of the misunderstandings.

I'd recommend everyone who wants to be a part of the UI debate to read the Gnome HIG before talking - that too contains information about both how and _why_ Gnome looks and acts like it does.

I saw someone suggesting an expert mode. It has been tried, and it doesn't work. But why should we have it? The only thing it leads to is more confusion. And, there are tools in Gnome that are very powerful, yet very simplistic. Look at it this way: Most often, it's not the tool, it's the user. Having more features won't make the user more powerful. It will make the average user less powerful and confused, whereas the power user will have no problem using the simple interface. I consider myself a power user, and I've been using Gnome since 2.0. In every part of my life, as a programmer, student, musician, whatever - I prefer simplicity to advancedness. Because something simple created to perfection will always be better than something advanced. This is what Gnome gives me now - Simplicity and concistency.

This new project surprises me a little bit. It's not because it's a good thing, but because I'm amazed that this man actually has the opportunity to gain support anywhere. I always try to be objective and understandable, but in this case it's not possible: Ali, or oGALAXYo, tends to troll around on osnews, and formerly the gnome.org mailing lists, accusing people, and generally being angry, and when people tell him to stop he replies with yet more accusations of how people attack him. He's kinda like Dave on Paradise Hotel (Yeah, I've seen it a couple of times).

I have absolutely no faith in that Project GoneME will do anything successful for the Desktop users. Especially when led by a man who in one post love a part of gnome, then two days later hate it - or suddenly hates Gnome as a whole and loves KDE. Then, all of a sudden, KDE is the wrong part. I'd love to see a roadmap for this project. And I'd love to see it change every day.

First of all, it complains massively about simple things as button orders, things that users don't notice on any other plan than an intuitive one - and he says things about f.i. esound (yes, it needs to be replaced) that are just cluttered with ignorance - a sound daemon has its use, ask any distributor.

Oh, and Gnome has a bugzilla. That's the place to tell anyone if you've found a bug or feature missing.

To end this post, I'd just like to say that I'm not a Gnome official in any way. I do support and participate in the community, but many people seem to think that everyone talking about Gnome positively belong to the Gnome set of developers, and often end up talking negatively about Gnome because of things that _are not part of Gnome at all_.