GNOME Developer Suggests Split From GNU Project

blozza2070 writes "In a recent posting from Philip Van Hoof, he suggests that GNOME split off from the GNU Project and has proposed a vote. He was informed he will need 10% of members to agree for a vote to be put forth. At the same time, David Schlesinger (on the GNOME Advisory Board) has agreed on a vote. Stormy Peters said she doesn't agree with this, but then gave everyone instructions on how to proceed with a vote. She mentioned that roughly 20 members are needed to agree." The mailing list server is timing out as of this writing, but iTWire has the Cliff's notes.

Comments

GNU's not worth it.

[Interoperable]

If the GNU project wants to restrict the speech of it's members on GNU discussion boards regarding the merits of proprietary software, it's not worth it. Restricting the voicing of opinions is absolutely the antithesis of what we should expect from open-source communities. If someone thinks Mono or VMware is worth using, fine. Stallman seemed to be suggesting that removing a blog could be considered as punishment for voicing such an opinion; that's hardly an open and frank discussion conducted in a open community. I can't see how censorship could possibly be an appropriate course of action.

Gnome is attempting (and succeeding) in presenting itself as a viable alternative to proprietary desktops. Dogmatic insistence that it be developed in a vacuum, uninfluenced by any proprietary developments is absurd and not in the goal of developing Gnome into a truly versatile platform. Open-source software will utterly fail if it's community is not open-minded. Thankfully, that's not the case and if the GNU project wants to take Gnome down that narrow path I hope Gnome will choose to find it's own way instead.

Re:GNOME slides further into irrelevancy.

[QCompson]

KDE is just technically better these days. It is implemented in a better programming language (even C++ is better than the C-and-GObject hellhole), built upon a better GUI toolkit (Qt kicks the fuck out of GTK+), and offers much better desktop applications and a more integrated desktop experience.

Funny, that's the main thing that stops me from using KDE (that and the continued instability of plasma). I have a hard time finding nice simple kde equivalents to audacious, deluge (vastly prefer it to ktorrent), gimp, pidgin and of course firefox (and now chrome). Since all my productive apps are GTK based, it is very hard for me to justify switching to KDE4.

Re:GNOME slides further into irrelevancy.

[sgage]

Oh great, here come the KDE wienies!

I knew this was going to happen ;-)

Re:GNOME slides further into irrelevancy.

[mukund]

I'll just reply to one paragraph of your post.

KDE is just technically better these days. It is implemented in a better programming language (even C++ is better than the C-and-GObject hellhole), built upon a better GUI toolkit (Qt kicks the fuck out of GTK+), and offers much better desktop applications and a more integrated desktop experience. Unless there are some huge changes within the GNOME community, they will not be able to match KDE's current environment, let alone exceed it.

• GNOME is not implemented in a single language. You can write GTK+ apps using GObject in C, C++, Python, C#, Java, etc. and there are many such apps shipping in GNOME.
• GObject (with the rest of GLib) is pretty good for what it provides for C as the base language target. You can use GObject classes (such as GTK+ widgets) without the verbosity from higher level languages, including C++. Arguably, many things in gtkmm are closer to C++ than when using Qt. Going by your opinion of GObject, you appear to lack experience in it to do a fair review. To repeat, GObject is such because it provides an object system for use in C.
• Whether Qt kicks the fuck out of GTK+ or not is simply opinion. Many of the features that most GUI applications use are provided by both toolkit families. Both have their quirks.

Mukund