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

Nokia had the same problem

[devxo]

Shuttleworth notes to that end, "Weâ(TM)ve failed." He adds, "Much of the language, and much of the decision making Iâ(TM)ve observed within Gnome, is based on the idea that Unity is competition WITH Gnome, rather than WITHIN Gnome."

There was a story on The Register today on why Nokia failed. They had the exact same problem - teams that should be working together are fighting against each other and in the end just losing together. That seems to be a large problem in OSS community too, and it's no wonder Nokia had it too (they had many Linux developers). But when a software company, usually proprietary, is ran good, it doesn't suffer such problems as management makes good decisions and gives orders. That is why Windows works good and why the quality is consistent.

Re:Nokia had the same problem

[VortexCortex]

Shuttleworth notes to that end, "Weâ(TM)ve failed." He adds, "Much of the language, and much of the decision making Iâ(TM)ve observed within Gnome, is based on the idea that Unity is competition WITH Gnome, rather than WITHIN Gnome."

There was a story on The Register today on why Nokia failed. They had the exact same problem - teams that should be working together are fighting against each other and in the end just losing together. That seems to be a large problem in OSS community too, and it's no wonder Nokia had it too (they had many Linux developers). But when a software company, usually proprietary, is ran good, it doesn't suffer such problems as management makes good decisions and gives orders. That is why Windows works good and why the quality is consistent.

Infighting in Microsoft is why we didn't get clear-type for over 10 years after it was available... (Clear-type is the software that gives fonts 3 times the horizontal resolution on LCDs) The Office Suite devs wanted it for their own -- to boost their own team's importance, and refused to fix the the MS Office font system to work with clear-type unless the clear-type devs were placed under the Office Suite team's umbrella.

This is just one small example of MS infighting stifling innovation. Please take your closed source software down from the pedestal. Management is the problem -- That, and a "not invented here" mentality. It can happen anywhere.

Ubuntu and Gnome are diverging because they each have their own goals and any interference with one's goals is not tolerated -- I've found that true collaboration basically requires an alignment of our goals -- Seems to me like human nature.

The difference is that when Canonical and Gnome bicker, I can still use the features that they independently develop... I'm not stuck waiting for 10 years (like for Windows clear-type).

Re:Nokia had the same problem

[Anonymous Coward]

We all know Microsoft's failures, but the reality is they are only failures because Microsoft has to program for the 90% of the market that has no idea how to use a computer instead of the 1% that do. If it were somehow switched and 11.04 was installed on 90% of the machines out there and people knew kinda how to use it (I'm hypothesizing OS switching and knowledge switching too) Ubuntu would be in the same situation with driver issues, machine speed issues, 3rd party add-on issues, hacker target issues, etc.

It's really not funny anymore so it is easy to pass up. For the absolute magnitude of stuff that Windows does right, even Vista and ME can be considered good code. Not the greatest, Not Microsoft's best, Not worth the price tag, but still good.

Re:Nokia had the same problem

[pieterh]

It's hard to know if you're serious when you say "Windows works good" but okaay....

You kind of miss the point about how open source teams organize. Competition is 80% of the reason for writing software as a sport. The infighting and hatred you see in these FOSS communities are the flip side of their creativity. Whereas the same infighting and hatred in a business setting is toxic.

FOSS communities that are polite, fully collaborative, kind, and patient, will die. They won't attract people who have emotional ties to the work they make; their contributors won't defend their works against criticism, won't defend them at conferences and in blogs.

I'm very happy each time I see these arguments. They are the best sign that FOSS is not just alive and healthy but an intrinsic expression of creativity that will never go away, and will continue to feed me an endless supply of alternatives.

Not surprised...

[Andy Dodd]

It's pretty clear that there are some massive egos/control-freaks within those running the GNOME project.

As far as user interfaces go, it is Havoc Pennington's way or the highway. Havoc has this crazy "usability comes from crippling" approach that dumbs down GNOME for entry-level users but makes it wholly unusable for power users.

Whereas KDE keeps "entry level" defaults and makes some of the niche/advanced configuration options (such as edge flipping) harder to find, GNOME's approach is to outright remove the feature. There are only so many features you can remove before your approach becomes unusable for many.

That's why I used to be a staunch GNOME supporter and fairly anti-KDE (I'm still not a fan of how they handled the Qt/GPL license incompatibilities, the issue didn't get resolved until Qt was effectively forced to change their license. The KDE developers had a consistent attitude that there was no problem and refused to take any approach to address), but have now pretty much changed over entirely to KDE. Around the same time the KDE license incompatibility issue was resolved is when Havoc began his reign of "cripple it in the name of usability" terror. Not only did the GNOME team remove edge flipping, they made it as difficult as possible to add it in after the fact (Brightside effectively broke after every GNOME release, and eventually GNOME broke the interfaces Brightside used to the point where the Brightside maintainer gave up.) It's always been there in KDE.

Yes, the KDE team has gotten a bad rep from KDE 4.0 getting shipped too early. I don't think there was any graceful way to do things here - there always comes a time when a project has to do a major rearchitecture, and sometimes that can't be done without some user pain. Later KDE4 releases are excellent. The key here is - KDE went through some pain in order to greatly improve the flexibility of the platform and leave them room to grow. GNOME didn't - in the short term that was good for GNOME, but in the long term that inflexibility is going to hurt.

Re:FreeDesktop.org is probably the way to go

[molnarcs]

(It doesn't help to see Jeff Waugh being all complainy on Mark's blog, either.)

He does the same thing on Aaron's blog, only a bit worse - drives the whole discussion off-topic with blathering about timelines and who said what at a conference three years ago and such... He was very good at destroying a conversation and degenerating it into an I said-He-said flamefest with personal insults directed at just about anyone who disagreed with him or who tried to get the conversation back on topic. Ironic, isn't it? He just proves the exact issues and points both Mark and KDE devs have with GNOME (specifically, the lack of cooperation on fd.o standards).

Re:meanwhile...

[MBGMorden]

This is the main thing pissing me off about the direction of Linux. Too much being different for the sake of being different. Ubuntu moved the buttons on me - ticked, ok, but whatever. I can use gconf to switch them back. Now Gnome is looking into the horrible travesty that is Gnome Shell 3, and recently has decided (in one of the most WTF moves in history) to kill off Minimize and Maximize buttons. Yes, Ubuntu is going with Unity instead of Gnome Shell, but we'll see how that goes. It still was a long ways from ready last time I tried it.

Overall, I think my Linux desktop experience may have peaked with Ubuntu 10.10. I've been a full-time user for 2 years now (and a dual-booter/occasional user for 12 years now), and at this point, I'm really looking at the possibility of just going back to Windows. Palladium/Trusted Computing seems to be dead in the water, and at least Microsoft isn't shaking stuff up just for the heck of it.