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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.
If they want to fork, let them. If it becomes any good, it'll be used
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
Havoc is NOT talking about breaking out of GNOME because he doesn't like the current way.
He is talking about forking off development for GNOME 3, because it would be too disruptive to move everyone onto GNOME 3 immediatly.
Basically GNOME 2 would continue as is, with incremental changes, while someone starts hacking on GNOME 3 for a future release. They would diverge quite heavily after a while, but when GNOME 3 has started getting momentum, GNOME 2 can be closed down.
I'm glad that you like it, but the decision to force it on the entire world was not the best one ever made by the GNOME project.
Force it on the entire world? Last time I checked, it was still possible to make Nautilus use "Windows File Browser" mode, and the gnome developers hadn't rendered the dozens of other Windows-esque file managers available for X inoperable. They added a choice, which happens to be the default setting, to allow Nautilus to behave in a different way. It's pretty much the only X file manager out there that dares to do something other than clone the Windows file browser, and for that "crime", it's widely castigated by the community.
God forbid those of us who think the Windows browser model is a horrible User Interface design should have an actual, viable option to choose.
God forbid that the GNOME developers should do anything other than follow the pack, and make their product indistinguishable from everyone else's.
God forbid that everyone who likes the browser model should have change an option, or install one of the dozen other managers that cater to their needs. But no, those of us who wanted something different were finally given an option, and that crime is apparently unforgivable.