Interview With The KDE And GNOME Release Managers

An anonymous reader writes "It has to be tough, keeping projects as big as GNOME and KDE organized, but that is the job given to those projects' 'release managers.' In an interview on Linux and Main, KDE's Dirk Mueller and GNOME's Jeff Waugh discuss their wacky, devil-may-care, hell-bent-for-leather, zany, fun-filled world -- the shadow, as T.S. Eliot put it, between the idea of a release and its reality."

Comments

I have a question

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome and KDE seem to be geared towards windows migrating ppl. They all emulate the same basic look and feel. My question is, is there any project of the same calibre (of would be soon), that does a native look and feel (modern and cool, like in movies) for Linux/BSD's ?

Thank you.

Amma Fui

Re:I have a question

[dotgod]

3dwm is an interesting 3D window manager project (not an X11 window manager though)...definitely a bit different from the "same basic look and feel"

Re:I have a question

[yamcha666]

I understand the above post's fact that it would be very difficult to create another set of libraries along with a desktop environment.

Yet the parent asks why the 2 major desktop environments look like Windows.

So why couldn't one (or a group of developers) combine both of these statements and create a window manager with a "modern and cool, like in the movies" interface that is compatable with either the GTK or QT libraries or both, (plus or minus patches for this window manager to make it compatable with the GTK or QT libraries)?

Though I am not a heavy developer, the concept of this wouldn't be difficult. It would be like rebuilding fluxbox to make it run KDE apps 100% natively instead of using a "transparency layer (?)" just so you can use KDE apps in fluxbox (or WindowMaker or IceWM etc).

Free and commercial release processes

[ColdChrist]

One of the things that's interesting about this article is how closely related the release process for free software is to that for commercial software. Commercial products have many things in their genesis that free products do not, but when it gets to be time to produce a clean release "the aim of the release process is to finish software, not to develop it." Waugh cites that quote from Havoc Pennington as applying to Free Software, but in fact it applies to both. It's a kind of convergent evolution into a niche; the ecological imperatives of product survival force projects to adopt these mechanisms in order to be successful.

The really interesting question is where does this convergence start? Are the reward systems, involving kudos and problem-solving pleasure for free software, and money for commercial software, fundamentally different? I suspect they're not, and that there is much less difference between an open source project and commercial product development than is sometimes thought. I'd guess that the more successful examples of each strongly resemble each other.

Re:Free and commercial release processes

[Anonymous Coward]

Think for a second about how works on free vs. commercial projects.

For the most part, the people working on free projects are a self-selected group of motivated talented people. For commercial projects - well - you probably remember doing 'group projects' in school.

The rewards for free software are small, and not at all required for existance (unlike say, a pay check). As a result, anyone who is not interested or talented enough to contribute leaves. For commercial projects, this just isn't the case.

Mozilla did it better

[sohp]

KDE and Gnome releases are fine, but compared to the Mozilla build/release process, managed by the enigmatic Leaf, they are 2nd class. Mozilla developers created their own tools to do it, too. Mozilla is cross platform, continuous builds, bug tracking integrated with version control, and they released regularly on a five week cycle (now quarterly), and daily build and smoketests. And once again, Mozilla is cross-platform -- Linux, Windows, and Mac OS 9/X.

Sorry to crash the party, but I have yet to see KDE or Gnome approach the bar that Leaf and Brendan Eich set high.

Re:Mozilla did it better

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

"bug tracking"

What can I say: the world's buggiest code required the world's best bug tracking software.

(this is not an insult - Mozilla has become a respectable, stable browser)

Who here remembers M7? It's so cool to watch a browser progress from it's early primitive roots to what it is today. Amazing.

Bravo, Mozilla developers - for developing the world's best browser.

Re:aint it ironic.......

[jonathan_ingram]

I would really like to know what the KDE developers and leaders really feel for Gnome and vice a versa.. some interesting interview will be that!

Most of them don't have any opinions either way - the main KDE/Gnome developers normally run an exclusively KDE/Gnome desktop, and so don't think about the other desktop at all. They're a very good example of convergent evolution. There *are* some times when something passes from one desktop to another, but they're relatively infrequent (for example, the Gnome 2 icons are *very* influenced by the KDE 2 ones, and in the other direction the KDE file manager got an improved look-n-feel after the release of Nautilus).

Re:Like on Jurassic Park...

[adadun]

Well, it wasn't strictly a Unix system - it was an IRIX system.

Re:aint it ironic.......

[LMCBoy]

Kdevelop is direct competitor of [the] MS programming environment.

No, it isn't.

Most importantly, KDevelop is not a commercial product, so it has nothing to compete for. Sure, it's nice if lots of people use it, but ultimately it matters not at all how many "customers" KDevelop has. As long as there are interested developers, the project will thrive.

More obviously, KDevelop targets only unix apps; MSVB targets only windows apps. They're in completely different "markets".