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Godwin's Law Invoked in Linus/Gnome Spat

Posted by Zonk on from the can't-the-nazis-stay-out-of-just-one-internet-argument dept.

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.

1 of 828 comments (clear)

  1. Attitude? Judge Linus's patches on their merits by golodh · · Score: 0, Redundant
    First off I am not a GNOME user. I'm a KDE user. I tried GNOME, didn't like it, found it unresponsive to requests, and put it on my "ignore" list. I wish GNOME all the best, and I don't mind using individual programs that are linked with the GNOME libraries (I let my distro install those too) but I don't really want to know about it anymore. Now I'm afraid that's a pretty negative and consumer-like attitude I know, but it's what I do.

    With Linus and GNOME there is a bit of a history. Linus looked at GNOME, didn't like it, switched to KDE, but in the mean time actually took the time to give feedback in the form of comments and suggestions. Not once but several times. Fairly mildly at first, but more acerbic as he got irritated. That's something people might mistake for "attitude". It isn't. It's frustration.

    Now Linus has put his money where his mouth is and produced patches that address his gripes with GNOME. With this he is telling GNOME very precisely what (some of) his gripes are and how he would suggest GNOME to deal with it.

    Whether GNOME accepts his patches is of course entirely up to them. It's their project. I could imagine (but I don't know because I don't care) that GNOME has this really thought-through interface behaviour that they want to keep. If Linus's patches break that, then of course GNOME cannot accept them. But either way the controversy is resolved.

    Either GNOME accepts the patches, and with it the implied criticism on their interface, or they reject the criticism of their interface model and then they don't want the patches. Those who want to use GNOME use it, those who don't use something else. End of problem.