Has GNOME Rejected Canonical Help? Shuttleworth Responds

akgraner writes "When Canonical made the decision to make Unity the default desktop, some questioned the GNOME/Canonical relationship. Adding fuel to this fire was the recent distribution split of revenue generated by Banshee. These decisions caused the Ubuntu, GNOME and even Fedora community members to ask why these things were done. In Dave Neary's 'Has GNOME rejected Canonical help?' post, he states, 'I have repeatedly read Canonical & Ubuntu people say, "We offered our help to GNOME, and they didn't want it."' Neary gives examples in his post of what others have said to back up the 'they didn't want it' claim by Canonical and Ubuntu people. Today, though, Shuttleworth responds on his blog. 'Competition is tough on the contestants, but it gets great results for everyone else.'"

Comments

Re:Extremely Aerogant

[DShard]

I disagree. Canonical has always been and always will be a leech. They work poorly with upstream. They happily gobble up the communities efforts and wall off their additions. They are a bottom feeder, even if they are popular. They were right to be criticized by Debian, Greg Kroah Hartman and now Gnome. The fight with Gnome is illustrative of their mindset. Refuse to be part of the community, then lament the community is closed off to them. It boggles the mind how much wind power their hand waving has generated. The best thing for the community is for shuttleworth to pack up his toys and go home like the spoiled man-child he is.

Re:Nokia had the same problem

[WaywardGeek]

The OSS community has innovation upside down. We let upstream teams (In this case Gnome or Nokia) stand in the way of innovation as gate keepers. We need to switch to a model more similar to Android, where any innovator can share their work quickly, without having to jump through hoops and waiting years. A new package system in Ubuntu could take the innovations we see in the Android app store, and build on them. It could enable not just apps, but libraries to be shared, with apps running in app jails, and with the exact libraries they were compiled and tested against. We need to enable innovation from individual coders, by promoting their work immediately, and freeing them from the hassle of convincing large upstream teams to adopt their changes. That would enable us to say "There is an app for that" about Ubuntu. As it is, OSS land is mostly a bunch of coders practicing mental masturbation, because there is little chance for most coders to share their work widely as simple installable packages available in Software Center. Instead, we have to copy source files from sourceforge or github, and paste them into our projects, with no system to push improvements upstream.

Mark Shuttleworth is mad because upstream didn't simply include all is work quickly, and without having to fight for it. I guess he knows now what it is like for the vast majority of coders who just want an app in Ubuntu. Similarly, Google is mad at Linux because Linux removed Google's Android contributions.

There should never be a gate-keeper on innovation. The setup we have now in OSS land is unacceptable. And, it's fixable.