Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Some of us disabled users are looking for an alternative operating system for our Windows XP netbooks. The compiz magnifier is great, but GNOME is the _only_ desktop environment that has a screen reader. The GNOME screen reader performs _very_ slowly on a netbook though. It even runs slow on a modern system sometimes.
My point? Can we stop with the political issues and try to just produce the best, stable, reliable system we possibly can? Can we stop changing the underlying components every two years? Can we stop changing things that don't make the system any better (like notification bubbles that require more daemons) and fix what we do have?
Extremely Aerogant
This is between Unity and GNOME. Leave Windows out of it!
also, this is not an odd "oops, we just didn't get around to it" event on the part of GNOME: how's that job D-Bus implementation in GNOME 3 coming? you know, the one that needlessly duplicates the one KDE implements, which we actually designed with thought of cross-project use including getting some feedback from non-KDE devs? or how about the screensaver D-Bus API which we implemented specifically with collaboration with GNOME devs at SUSE, only later to have GNOME not implement it and then complain to us that it used the org.freedesktop namespace? or how about how GNOME devs specifically blocked the formation of a common git repository for fd.o specs, and then when there was finally agreement (after an in-person meeting) insist on implementing it themselves, ignoring that repo had already been started but by people with @kde.org email addresses, and then after taking months to eventually duplicate that effort not implement the most critical part of it: the metadata?
Shuttleworth suggests that building development around FreeDesktop.org specs (as suggested by Aaron Seigo) is probably a good route to take, especially since Ubuntu is NOT just GNOME, but also KDE (Kubuntu), etc.
I heartily agree with that. I want to see Unity come out and kick butt, and it sounds like as good as GNOME Shell might be, GNOME people are forcing this into a you-vs.-us fight.
(It doesn't help to see Jeff Waugh being all complainy on Mark's blog, either.)
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.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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).
I've tried them both and GNOME Shell is sooooo much better than Unity. I really have been disappointed by many UI changes in Ubuntu in recent releases. All heralded as being great usability decisions.
Cleaning up the Status panel, by adding more clicks to get to functions... Why?
The notification system I just have never gotten used to. Why must I be notified of new IM's by seeing the IM text, but when I go to try to get rid of it, it fades out.
Perhaps their just not as good as "usability" as they think they are? Hardware that just works is different, they still are the best I've found in that category.
For GNOME Shell, I'm currently testing out Fedora 15 Alpha. They also now offer nightly builds so you can test without breaking your system (http://alt.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/nightly-composes/).
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.
You are comparing Apples to Oranges.
Nokia and Canonical are companies. It is managements' job to make everyone in the company work towards a coherent goal - the fact that this includes Linux developers is irrelevant. Companies selling/using open-source technologies are just as capable as proprietary companies of doing this effectively, or (as in the case of Nokia) of failing at it.
Nokia and Canonical both also worked within a community. That adds an extra level of complexity. That is where Canonical failed.
No one is suggesting that Canonical failed at internal management in the way that Nokia failed.
Apple (dare I say it) markets to an even less tech-savvy demographic than MS, and they've rarely ever had "misses" as painful as some of the MS ones.
Not that I'm an MS hater, mind- they've produced some good nuggets over the years. It'd be much easier to like them if it weren't for all the evil.
To be honest I don't care if Nokia tanks, but I think they took Qt down with them. For the last three years it has moved *very* slowly when it comes to desktop features and by relicencing from GPL to LGPL I think they killed off any chance to reboot the Trolltech business model of GPL/commercial dual licensing. Digia may milk the existing customers but they lost both three years working on mobile features no one will use and many proprietary software vendors will use the LGPL version without paying or contributing. That sucks because whatever you may think of KDE, Qt is actually a very good development platform. If Gnome won't cooperate, I think Shuttleworth should just clone the look and feel and make Unity/Qt instead.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
@Lennart: "If you list this notifier spec, then I can list you the sound theming/naming specs which KDE has shown no interest in."
:)
... simply to provide compatibility. would GNOME devs do that today? doubtful, because our priorities, as you point out, are indeed different.
that's an incorrect comparison.
if we (KDE) had offered a bunch of critique on the sound theme spec, had someone come to us with an implementation in Qt and then still gone off and done our own thing instead, then it would be an adequate comparison. but that isn't what happened, is it?
we (KDE) simply haven't gotten around to implementing the sound theming spec. why? as you note, it's not a high priority for us. but i guarantee you that if someone stepped up to do some work on the event sounds infra in kdelibs, stop #1 would be that naming spec.
also, this is not an odd "oops, we just didn't get around to it" event on the part of GNOME: how's that job D-Bus implementation in GNOME 3 coming? you know, the one that needlessly duplicates the one KDE implements, which we actually designed with thought of cross-project use including getting some feedback from non-KDE devs? or how about the screensaver D-Bus API which we implemented specifically with collaboration with GNOME devs at SUSE, only later to have GNOME not implement it and then complain to us that it used the org.freedesktop namespace? or how about how GNOME devs specifically blocked the formation of a common git repository for fd.o specs, and then when there was finally agreement (after an in-person meeting) insist on implementing it themselves, ignoring that repo had already been started but by people with @kde.org email addresses, and then after taking months to eventually duplicate that effort not implement the most critical part of it: the metadata?
in contrast, we could see how KDE implemented support for the visual notificatons D-Bus protocol as implemented in GNOME, even though it has evident limitations and is a 100% subset of something we already have in the form of KNotify
what GNOME needs is not more apologists making excuses for poor behavior but people who will stand up and take ownership of their actions.
Jesus had a UNIX beard.
I find it thoroughly ironic that this commentary issues from the head of an organization named Canonical. So does this mean that Canonical will shortly be changing its name? Will there be a contest - err, competition - with a prize to choose it?
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.
My blog
Apple (dare I say it) markets to an even less tech-savvy demographic than MS, and they've rarely ever had "misses" as painful as some of the MS ones.
Not that I'm an MS hater, mind- they've produced some good nuggets over the years. It'd be much easier to like them if it weren't for all the evil.
It's the difference between having an established market and custom-building a market. When you're a small player (10% now, 0% at start) you can afford to take some chances and break away from established ways of doing things . You don't really have that option when you're a big player, not without alienating a significant portion of your customer base.
I was going to mod you down, but I couldn't find "-1 Clueless" in the options.
Switching to OpenStep wasnt' a panacea. While I never used it, I heard OSX 10.0 was a real mess too, which is why 10.1 was quickly pushed out as a free update.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
The main problem with OS X 10.0 was performance, and this wasn't due to adopting OPENSTEP (not OpenStep - OpenStep is a specification, OPENSTEP is an operating system), but due to replacing code. One of the biggest changes between OPENSTEP 4.2 and OS X 10.0 was replacing Display PostScript with Quartz. This moved to a compositing model, rather than a direct drawing model. This gives a significant performance advantage on modern machines. If you drag a window across the screen on OPENSTEP, every application underneath gets a load of redraw events and has to run some quite processor-intensive code to update the display. With OS X, the GPU just draws a few textured rectangles. With 10.0, however, this was all done in software, and on a 266MHz PowerPC was very slow. Especially since the software paths weren't very well optimised (10.0 was the 'make it work' release, 10.1 was the first 'make it fast' release).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
When the hell did they let out Jared Loughner?
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
But when a software company, usually proprietary, is ran good
Ran well.
It's ridiculous to run a distribution that doesn't have package signing. Especially one that pushes out updates as frequently as Arch does. Arch's complete disregard for basic security measures is truly amazing.
I remember when a "power user" was someone who tweaked compile time options or applied a little patch. These days it seems that if there isn't an option right there in the UI then the "power users" aren't happy. They accuse projects of "dumbing down" but in reality I think it's (self proclaimed) "power users" who have dumbed down to the point that they see having to touch anything vaguely approaching the internals (such as gconf) an outrageous hurdle.
Maybe I'm misremembering, but hasn't Clear Type shipped in Windows since XP launched in 2001? So, you're saying that this technology was available in 1991 or earlier?
No, I'm not saying that at all -- I'm just repeating what's in TFL... But, yes, it does seem to me that it took over ten years to be fully available.
For example, early in my tenure, our group of very clever graphics experts invented a way to display text on screen called ClearType. It worked by using the color dots of liquid crystal displays to make type much more readable on the screen. Although we built it to help sell e-books, it gave Microsoft a huge potential advantage for every device with a screen. But it also annoyed other Microsoft groups that felt threatened by our success.
[...]
Engineers in the Windows group falsely claimed it made the display go haywire when certain colors were used. The head of Office products said it was fuzzy and gave him headaches. The vice president for pocket devices was blunter: he’d support ClearType and use it, but only if I transferred the program and the programmers to his control. As a result, even though it received much public praise, internal promotion and patents, a decade passed before a fully operational version of ClearType finally made it into Windows.
--Dick Brass (Vice president at Microsoft from 1997 to 2004).
I agree the time line may seem a bit dubious -- the sub pixel rendering method was patented in 1998 -- it could have been invented before that time... According to the Wikipedia article
ClearType was invented in the Microsoft e-Books team by Bert Keely and Greg Hitchcock. It was then analyzed by researchers in the company, and signal processing expert John Platt designed an improved version of the algorithm
So I suppose, according to Dick Brass, Keely & Hitchcock would have had to invent the system prior to 1991, before a patent was filed for the tech... I don't think he's claiming it was a decade before it was available.
I think means it was a decade before it actually worked correctly in Windows... (at which point I would consider it stable enough to rely upon -- Available != Available to be considered stable) In which case the timeline is less dubios, and my position stands that without the infighting I would not have had to wait a decade for "a fully operational version of ClearType" to finally make it into Windows.
P.S. Bullshit pedantic discussion aside: The ex Vice President of Microsoft says:
"Unlike other companies, Microsoft never developed a true system for innovation. Some of my former colleagues argue that it actually developed a system to thwart innovation. Despite having one of the largest and best corporate laboratories in the world, and the luxury of not one but three chief technology officers, the company routinely manages to frustrate the efforts of its visionary thinkers."
To me this means that corporate infighting at MS has stifled innovation in Windows -- Which was my original point.