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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.'"
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).
(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).