Havoc Pennington on GNOME 3's Future

An anonymous reader writes "Havoc Pennington, lead developer of GNOME, wants to fork GNOME 3. 'So the forces of existing userbase, the easiest-to-reach future userbase, cross-platform applications, and funded development efforts are strongly pulling GNOME 2 toward conservatism. I think GNOME 3 should be a fork for that reason.'" This has been a common practice for not only many open source projects, but proprietary systems such as Solaris for major revisions, so it's not as tumultous a change as the word "fork" may imply.

Comments

Re:Translation

[Slack3r78]

That's because the Windows 95 approach to being spacial wasn't very good. On the other hand, MacOS = 9 used a spacial finder, and its absence in OS X is a common complaint amongst the old school Mac crowd. Just because the one implementation you're experienced with sucked doesn't mean the whole concept of a spatial filebrowser is bad.

Re:Not always true

[Havoc Pennington]

Read my blog post - it's a reply to _other_ people proposing GNOME 3, I'm saying "_if_ we did a GNOME 3, here is how it would make sense and what it would look like"

Sensationalism (TFA Updated)

[bottlerocket]

Pennington isn't proposing anything. He's merely examining the current discussions on the future of Gnome and exploring possible options. From TFA:

Ah geez, again I foolishly fail to remember that phrasing things a certain way results in Slashdot articles which inevitably have misleading headlines and summaries. For the record, my point is not that we should do a GNOME 3 (especially right now), and it definitely isn't that I personally intend to do a GNOME 3. It's that if someone did a GNOME 3, the right way to do it is to create a fairly long-lived branch (aka fork) of the project while continuing the GNOME 2.x series on a 6-month cycle in the meantime. I'm responding to other people's blogs here, rather than proposing something.

Re:Translation

[Slack3r78]

I'd highly recommend you read this article at Ars Technica regarding the Finder and spatialness. It's more than up to Ars' usual high standard, and should give a better idea of what a spatial interface is, and why it can be a good idea, if implemented right.