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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.
According to the article, Richard Stallman wants GNOME to quit presenting proprietary software as legitimate. Assuming I read that right.
Philip Van Hoof
Fri, 11 Dec 2009 08:21:53 -0800
On Fri, 2009-12-11 at 10:12 -0500, Richard Stallman wrote:
> But GNOME is part of the GNU Project, and it ought to support the free
> software movement. The most minimal support for the free software movement
> is to refrain from going directly against it; that is, to avoid presenting
> proprietary software as legitimate.
I understand your position. I think you might not understand the
position of a lot of GNOME foundation members and contributors.
Their position isn't necessarily compatible with your position that
GNOME should "avoid presenting proprietary software as legitimate".
The way I see it is that most members want GNOME to stay out of that
philosophic discussion. Although GNOME usually advises to "work
upstream" and to "do things opensource when possible, as much as
possible". This is just a personal point of view, of course.
You, as one of the key FSF people, appear to be keen[1] on enforcing a ...
strict policy on how GNU's member-projects should behave. So
I propose to have a vote on GNOME's membership to the GNU project.
> I think Planet GNOME should have a rule to this effect.
I think it's clear that I disagree. Philosophically.
> There are many ways to implement such a rule, of which "block the
> whole blog" is about the toughest one we might consider. I'd suggest
> rather to try a mild approach; I'm sure that can do the job.
Let's first get a consensus from our members on GNOME's status as being
or not being a well-behaving GNU project, or having its own identity.
Original thread, alternative link: http://www.mail-archive.com/foundation-list@gnome.org/msg04068.html
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Stallman is consistent about his beliefs. Don't read 3rd hand re-interpretations: proceed directly to the GPL, and to Stallman's presentations, to understand what he said and what he believes.
Stallman is a visionary, not an "extremenist". Sometimes that means the rest of us need to pay the rent and don't follow his grand visions, but he's consistent and historically very perceptive of the risks of the slippery slopes often presented by people, and their corporations, who don't share that vision. In this case, Silverlight does in fact present some nasty risks to Gnome and free software development. We've seen Microsoft's "embrace and extend" behavior too often to trust them in this case.
I don't think that Miguel is all that popular. The last time I saw a long thread with him here, he suffered pretty badly. Making mono a dependency in Gnome exposes the project to unnecessary risk.
I respect Stallman far more than de Icaza, both for his thoughts and his actions over the years. Stallman is often taken out of context, but he is very consistent, and his statements almost always make sense years later - sometimes prophetically so.
There are a group of people (mostly affiliated with corporations) who have a hate-on for Stallman, because he values his principles more than he does development speed, ease of use, profits, or being able to use the latest shiny thing from MS.
Slashdot - the place where you can look like a genius by restating the obvious
And pushing Tomboy means it's nothing but a ploy to get Mono distributed. Choosing a minor app that takes 189 freaking MB of memory for nothing but displaying sticky notes on the screen is preposterous when you have similar programs which do the same in a few MBs. It's waste for your high-end desktop/laptop with 2-4GB RAM, it's a deal breaker for slimmer configurations.
Mono was a trap from the very beginning. Let's not let it drag us down.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
And Ballmer can go fork himself!
Bada Bing!
There is a blog aggregator called Planet GNOME which pulls together blog posts from various Gnome developers. One of these developers is Miguel de Icaza, a fairly senior GNOME developer (I believe he started both the GNOME and Mono projects, though I don't know his current position in them). Miguel is known, and somewhat infamous, for supporting MS Standards like C# (hence Mono, an opensource implementation of it), and OOXML.
In this instance Miguel wrote a blog post about Silverlight that reads like a press release. Silverlight is a proprietary and patent-encumbered replacement for Flash written by Microsoft.
Thus a promo for Silverlight was showing up on Planet GNOME.
This was not the only time something like this had happened, these are blogs afterall, people write about all sorts of stuff. Thus people started discussing a code of conduct about appropriate topics for blogs on Planet GNOME.
Stallman stopped by to offer his opinion (just couple very short posts in a long discussion) saying that people shouldn't use Planet GNOME to talk about proprietary projects like promos for Silverlight or even talk about using vmware since Gnome is a GNU project and opposed to proprietary software.
Philip Van Hoof responded saying he disagreed and started talking about a split, a few other people started talking about the rules surrounding the vote and the rest kept talking about the idea of a code of conduct.
I don't really know who anyone is other than Miguel and Stallman, but my gut says that no vote is going to occur.
I stole this Sig
Have you ever met RMS face to face and listened to him explaining himself?
I have, and from my personal experience, he was nothing like an extremist. He has a rigid and well defined set of core principles WRT software (summarized in the "four freedoms") and he holds fast to them. But on other topics, he is very tolerant and shows great respect to others' views.
And he's very sensitive to the Dark Side, to what could possibly go wrong. This is the same sensitivity a careful programming expert possesses. A good programmer can sense the smell of bugs, terrible design, or poor implementation a mile away from the pile of computer code, and RMS can sense what could possibly breach his principles. A good programmer does not gain the ability of "smelling the bugs" by being an oversensitive, and neither did RMS. He is just careful -- He *thinks* carefully and so he anticipates the possible disaster.
I'm not trying to paint him as a flawless character, and if I sound like I was doing that, I apologize. I was simply telling my fellow /.ers my *personal* *impression* of him.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
OTOH, Gnome had to be written because of KDE's relationship to proprietary software. For many years, KDE was a better overall environment and attracted more users. But as the corporate world began to look for ways to market Linux-based distros, it was Gnome's relative purity (not any of its technical merits, which are few) that got KDE pushed to the sidelines.
Are we now going to see Gnome become the encumbered environment that's more popular with users, and KDE freer one?
Its kind of absurd when you think about it. Copying Microsoft's stuff will only make Gnome more like WINE, only less popular. And can you see GNU making further concessions for Microsoft's patented ideas within their projects?? Don't be ridiculous!
de Icaza and his troop want to continue a career of aping Microsoft's binary components while leaving almost all of the design and other heavy lifting to the latter. They are not worth the trouble that brings. Let them fork Gnome into something else and then see which environment continues to get included in the corporate-supported distros.
They do not know how things went before GNU and Linux were there, when to have an usable development environment you had to pay for an operating system (more expensive if it was a developer-oriented version), a windowing system, a file manager, an office application, a web browser, an email client, a compiler, a debugger, a zip program, a picture viewer, access to the official developer's documentation, and a full set of "Undocumented %s" books. Not to mention any library you might want to use.
Now they are growing tired of the "free software fundamentalists" because they do not see that what they've accomplished is inseparable from the ideology in which they believed. They just think that for some reason, charitable organizations such as Microsoft, Oracle, Sony and all the hardware manufacturers have an interest in providing them with software free of charge, and with unlimited freedom to use it in whatever way they see fit - and that they will keep doing so forever, even when that harms the sales of their commercial products.
GNOME will turn away from the FSF, this is obvious, and has been obvious since the first day the Mono affaire began. What will happen after Microsoft will be in control of key components of GNOME, is obvious too.
An then, hopefully before long, some new RMSes will appear, inspiring a free software movement again.
The thing to keep in mind about Stallman's "crazy" opinions is the function that they serve among the much large set of opinions that actually control what the software world looks like. Roughly speaking, the software(and availability of hardware support) that will actually be available in the present and immediate future reflects the a weighted average of the present's opinions of what software ought to be.
There is always going to be a reliable bloc of "all proprietary, all the time" opinions, because that is where the best money is. There will also usually be a reliable supply of "C'mon guys, pragmatic compromise!" opinions; because that is the home of a particularly nice costs/features ratio. "All Free, all the time", by contrast, is a largely thankless ideological position(since it will, at any given time, pay less well than "all proprietary" and be missing features that "pragmatic compromise" has). However, since future software availability reflects(roughly) a weighted average of today's opinions, it has a very important role to play.
If today's opinions are all "proprietary" or "pragmatic compromise", tomorrow's software landscape will move a bit closer to all proprietary. Each iteration will go the same way. The existence of the zealous(and explicitly ideological) "Free Only" faction helps keep things from drifting steadily in the proprietary direction.
Pretty much so, there is a major push to switch Gnome to C#
[citation needed]. There's exactly a single GNOME desktop dependency using C#, Tomboy, and even that's been cloned in C++ (GNote). and is gaining adoption instead of the Mono-based variant by many major distros including Fedora. I really wouldn't be surprised to see it proposed to replace Tomboy in the upcoming months.
.NET components accepted or even proposed to be included in GNOME in years. The Mono fear is a sound one, but it's not one you realistically have to worry about today as a GNOME user. With the recent improvements in GThumb and newer photo cataloging apps like Shotwell, not even F-Spot can be considered a 'killer app' for Mono anymore. That community has long since left GNOME along with Miguel.
Furthermore, if GNOME's heading in any direction on the desktop, it's towards enabling 3D, networking, web and presence technologies through the stack. There has been a heavy push to add networking to the lower libraries so that libraries above can take advantage without reinventing the wheel. A D-Bus layer is merging into GLib next. GNOME Shell is written mostly in Javascript with Clutter being used as a 3D toolkit, after Gtk+ itself was extensively modified for better offscreen rendering support. Webkit replaced Mozilla's Gecko, and is being used by more up-and-coming GNOME projects. Telepathy and Empathy were adopted into GNOME and gives us an instant messaging client. There are half a dozen new projects around the rather small-but-growing geography and cartography communities. GNOME technologies are also heading towards the more-deeply embedded direction, with Clutter-GTK+ pushing Moblin to new heights and products like the Litl webbook (which is also very heavily Javascript-based).
There have been no new
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
There was a project named GNU. Then came GNUstep. Then came GNUstep + WindowMaker. GNU looked upon this and called it good, and declared it the official desktop of the GNU project. But GNUstep was not finished, not even close.
Then kame KDE. It was based upon the not-so-free Qt. Everyone at GNU cried "oh shit." Fire and brimstone began to fall.
Then came Miguel, a shit-disturber from the NetBSD holy wars. GNOME was cooked up with an official "fuck you" to the KDE team on their mailing lists. The 0.33 release was based on a bunch of free tools hastily thrown together and re-branded with the never-proven CORBA thrown into the mix.
Then came RedHat, wading into the morass and inspiring GNOME to jump from version 0.33 to version 1.0 overnight, resulting in much crash-age and tooth-gnashage. But the gospel had been preached and accepted in the West, and even Slashdot jumped on Miguel's bandwagon. Yea, even the Rasterman was drawn into the mighty whirlpool for a time and Enlightenment was lost to history. So the holy wars were joined.
Over time, KDE became more free. The dreaded, reviled Qt became GPL, then LGPL. On the flipside, GNOME began adopting questionable technologies like MONO. The grinning spectre of Dread Lord Gates lurked in the shadows. The wheel had turned.
And yet back in the dustbin of history, GNUstep waited. And all along this would have been the best choice of all, had Stallman & co not thrown their weight knee-jerk behind "anyone but KDE". Given the return of NextStep under the name "Mac OS X," just imagine the interoperability and cross-compatibility we could have today?
The whole situation amuses me given that the only reason Gnome exists is because back during KDE 1.x days it was "OMG QT is too proprietary!"
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
And he's right. Microsoft sets the standard because they have the largest platform (Windows) and they not only get to decide what the spec is, they will also release it after they released the latest Windows version.
To top that; Microsoft gets to decide if they even should release the latest specs...
*think... think.... think...*
We also have better cross platform tools already with Qt4.x... And for everything that's not native code we have webbrowsers...
*think... think... think...*
RMS is 100% correct about dumping this redundant piece of locking shittery.
Here be signatures
Rather than Gnome leave GNU, wouldn't it be easier for Richard Stallman to just fork reality? It seems he's always wanted his own.
Mixing non-free software with free software systems is a slippery slope. To work on that slippery slope, as most real-world software development must, an anchor is needed. RMS and FSF are that anchor. Even though I don't agree with them 100%, I realize that my idea of good free software would be impossible if they didn't fight for their ideal and keep everything from sliding down the slippery slope.
So even if it's sometimes sensible and useful to mix free and non-free, especially from user point of view, I sure hope FSF and everything directly supported by FSF stays pure.