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Godwin's Law Invoked in Linus/Gnome Spat
lisah writes "The flame wars between Linus Torvalds and the GNOME community continue to burn. Responding to Torvalds' recent claim that GNOME 'seems to be developed by interface Nazis' and that its developers believe their 'users are idiots,' a member of the Linux Foundation's Desktop Architects mailing list suggested that Torvalds use GNOME for a month before making such pronouncements. Torvalds, never one to back down from a challenge, simply turned around and submitted patches to GNOME and then told the list, '...let's see what happens to my patches. I guarantee you that they actually improve the code.' After lobbing that over the fence, Torvalds concluded his comments by saying, 'Now the question is, will people take the patches, or will they keep their heads up their arses and claim that configurability is bad, even when it makes things more logical, and code more readable.'" Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.
They all come off as squabbling children. This is FOSS' finest?
Here are the highlights for those who didn't RTFA:
Lopez: "Linus, you don't know how to read Spanish, so are you an idiot too?"
[snip]
Schaller: "Could maybe be a good way to start a constructive dialog instead of this useless mudslinging?"
[snip]
Torvalds: "What I find unconstructive is how the GNOME people always make *excuses*. It took me a few hours to actually do the patches. It wasn't that hard. So why didn't I do it years ago?
I'll tell you why: because GNOME apologists don't say "please send us patches". No. They basically make it clear that they aren't even *interested* in fixing things, because their dear old Mum isn't interested in the feature.
[snip]
But why, oh, why, have GNOME people not just said "please fix it then"?
Instead, I _still_ (now after I sent out the patch) hear more of your kvetching about how you actually do everything right, and it's somehow *my* fault that I find things limiting.
Here's a damn big clue: the reason I find GNOME limiting is BECAUSE IT IS."
Even just bump for the response
o p_architects/2007-February/001129.html
http://lists.linux-foundation.org/pipermail/deskt
I'm a huge rabid KDE fan. I use it on FreeBSD. It's fast, snappy responsive and quick. Other than some minor issues with HAL, it's also bug free. But then I needed a Linux distro for use with a project. I unfortunately chose Kubuntu. I swear Kubuntu must be an Ubuntu conspiracy to make people hate KDE. It's slow, bloated, buggy and a mess. And sluggish.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
People should read the thread where all this happened: http://lists.linux-foundation.org/pipermail/deskt
After someone asked about where the patches were, Linus said the following:
I dunno. I think it's fine for him to act all badass once in a while; it gets people's attention.
As for the Gnome issue... I rather agree with him that it's underfeatured. Honestly, XFCE is about as robust for grandma needs, at a much lower HD/RAM footprint.
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when they are happy to endorse the exact same kind of defamation they claim to oppose
Who modded that up?
Did you even read the links you provided, or do you just like to defame an organization as you whine about about defaming others?
And as to your misleading comments implying they only care when Jews are harassed, here's one of many examples of ADL condemning anti-Arab and anti-Muslim violence after 9/11.
make world, not war
As the mother of an autistic (PDD) child--thank you for saying all that.
I'm so fucking sick and tired of these geeks who think autism is some sort of neato cool thing to have which makes your life a magical fairyland of math and science genius while explaining away their aversion to dating and soap. That attitude alone tells me they have no fucking clue what they are talking about.
Autism is not a benefit and it's not fun and games. It's a fucking nightmare! I can't even begin to imagine what my son goes through when he "short circuits" on sensory overload. And he's old enough now to realize something is going wrong, but he can't do anything to stop it. How come none of the "autism wannabes" out there ever talk about that aspect? Maybe because they're not actually autistic? Trust me, if I could I'd take my son's autism away from him and give it to one of those "autism is so kewl!" geeks so their dream of being autistic can come true.
Do you even know what you're talking about? The GTK file dialog is almost exactly the same as the OS X file dialog. Compare these screenshots:
GTK save file dialog: http://clemens-and.nihongonauts.com/uploads/gtk2.
OS X save file dialog: http://www.uwec.edu/help/MacOSX/Images/dialog/fil
GTK open file dialog: http://www.flamerobin.org/images/screenshots/0.6.
OS X open file dialog: http://www.guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/interfac
Which part of the GTK file dialog is "much worse" than the OS X one? There's almost no difference.
How naive you are. Things don't work like that for 90% of the users, sorry.
It is not correct to say that Sawfish got replaced by Metacity due to it being deciding its configurability was bad, far from it. Sure there
where people who felt Sawfish went a bit overboard in that regard, but that was not the reason it got
ditched as the default GNOME window manager. The reason for that was simply that after Eazel went backrupt and Sawfish maintainer John Harper
had to find a new job, he ended up at Apple. And thus he couldn't maintain Sawfish anymore. The really special thing about Sawfish was that it
was written in its own Lisp dialect so as part of Sawfish you got both an extra lisp interpreter and GTK+ bindings for it.
All of these three went unmaintained as John went away and nobody where interested in taking over. Thus the GNOME developers had to look elsewhere
for a maintained window manager, it was decided that one should aim for one written in C like the rest of the desktop libraries to lessen the chance
of future maintenance prolems. To answer this call Havoc Pennington stepped up with Metacity and it was quickly adopted by a lot of GNOME developers and
users and subsequently chosen as the standard. Havoc was very strict about what he let into Metacity, due to a policy that requests for config options was usually a result of broken behaviour in the window manager and thus feeling the behaviour should be fixed instead of a config option added to work around the problem.
This was in line with the policy that do govern GNOME, in the sense that there is a consensus to not allow 'random' patches
add config options to the GUI without a very good reason. For instance one shouldn't add config options as a way to work around bugs or
missing features in lower parts of the stack, instead one should try to fix them. In the case of Metacity this was applied in a much sterner/hardcore
fashion that for most other modules, but due to Havoc's high profile I think the policy he kept for metacity colored how people outside the project perceived
the project as a whole.
Two years ago IIRC the whole GOME usability discussion popped up in OSNews, involving its editor, Eugenia Loli-Queru.
It became very clear that GNOME did not even accept patches. Not only that, they didn't even look at substantial percentage of patches.
In another, more recent, example, the FreeBSD GNOME guy said that it was hard working with the GNOME hackers, because they practically only care about Linux (as opposed to KDE people, who were cooperative) and were not really focused on portability.
A few years back, glibc maintainers refused to accept some OpenBSD suggestions reagarding C string functions (safer by design, from the OpenBSD team, with an extensive proven record in safe coding)- they only did so after two years, IIRC.
So, yeah, it seems there's some problems with GNOME people.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts