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The Full Story Behind the Canonical vs. GNOME Drama
supersloshy writes this followup to our Thursday discussion of friction between Canonical and GNOME:
"I've seen a lot of GNOME bashing for various reasons here on Slashdot as well as several other websites. The problem with all of this is that you never hear GNOME's side of the situation, making a lot of disrespectful comments about GNOME (or the others involved) rather baseless and illogical. Dave Neary has an extremely thorough blog post which details problems on all sides that make the issue much more complicated than 'GNOME is being idiotic by not accepting our technology.' The points covered in the blog post include, among others, how Freedesktop.org is broken as a standards body, that Mark Shuttleworth doesn't understand how GNOME works, that GNOME is not easy to understand, and that open discussions from the very beginning are important for specification development and adoption. Another blog post by 'Sankar' also covers similar points while defending GNOME."
I never liked Gnome and I hate Unity even more.
For those without the patience to read this article (which is much longer than I intended it to be when I started!), here are the headline points:
-FreeDesktop.org is broken as a standards body
-Mark Shuttleworth doesn’t understand how GNOME works
-GNOME is not easy to understand
-Deep mistrust has developed between Canonical, GNOME & KDE
-Difficult people are prominent in each of these projects
-Behind closed doors conversations are poison
-For people to work together, they need to be in the same place
Pulled from http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2011/03/11/lessons-learned/
In the end, they're both going to be irrelevant. GNOME shell is too late, and doing it their own way, going further away from what most people want in a desktop, and Unity is already outdated when you compare it to what's happening in the tablet world.
So a pox on both their houses. They sort of deserve each other.
If people need to be in the same place to work how does telecommuting work?
It doesn't. That's why people working remote often go visit the people they are working with, or at least they have one person who does if there are a group of them.
Telecommuting works because there is a buffer of understanding built up by in-person meetings and actions.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Gnome weren't interested? If it matters to Canonical so much, why not just contribute the necessary support into the core libs? Refactor the gnome library so it supports both the gnome way of doing things and this new-fangled KDE/unity way and can be pluggable. Strict Gnome implementations can do it their way or link your lib.
If Ubuntu Gnome desktop (even running gnome-shell) is nicer that official Gnome, your fork will be adopted by other distros and thus 'win'.
blog post 1 and blog post 2.
Enjoy.
-chris
If I remember correctly, Trolls get a +3 when bashing Gnome.
Take off every Sig. For great justice.
Now, if you didn't hear about, they want to remove close buttons from applications.
They force on you to suspend your system on lid close,
They decide that you don't need toolbar applets, like cpu monitor.
I still use gnome, but my patience is almost broken.
Yesterday, for example I installed ADW home screen for my android phone, and boy did I have fun with it, because it has so
many settings.
(Note that by default, it was quite sucky, but with customization, it became just perfect).
Android just follows Gnome policy of 'No settings, we know whats good for you', thus I am giving that example.
I am really tired of lack of settings in Gnome, because that myth that it confuses novices is just a joke.
Novices can just not change the defaults, and devs are free to set defaults as they wish, and thus we get a gnome equivalent, but one that fits everybody, not
just a bunch of devs that think that they know everything.
So, next update, I am switching to KDE, I have had enough.
Its not like windows, but all of the layouts i have seen (default and opensuse being the main ones) are somewhat obvious where everything is and extra features are pretty easy to ignore. Is the multiple desktops that are confusing or the bar on top?
KDE also has some confusing interface differences form windows in some of its applications. Such as the default single click opening of files and folders.
I am a long time gnome user and i never heard complain that the layout is confusing.
Or did i miss the part that is about gnome 3?
If people need to be in the same place to work how does telecommuting work?
Poorly in most cases. Telecommuting can work in some cases but only for cases where the need to communicate is either minimal or well defined. I've telecommuted (worked from home) and I'm nowhere near as productive. Most jobs involve a significant amount of communication and it is MUCH easier to communicate in person. Emails and phone calls are great but there is no substitute for face to face communication and close proximity when collaborating on a project. There are exceptions where telecommuting works great but they are and will remain exceptions for most of us.
Difficult people are behind every project it is called pride, get over it
There is pride and there is arrogance and they are not the same thing. Being proud of what you have done doesn't give you or anyone else the right to be a jerk.
Mistrust develops because one side does all the work while the other complains about it.
Mistrust is caused by many things. Every argument has two sides and in almost every case both sides have a least some (though rarely equal) legitimacy to their arguments. People are political animals by nature and if they aren't able to talk about what they are doing AND their motivations for doing so in an efficient manner, mistrust is the inevitable result.
After seeing similar dramas play out in other high profile FOSS projects over the years, it makes me wonder if this is how all semi-successful FOSS projects eventually end up. Politics exist in any organization, but at least in software development corporations, people have incentives to try to work things out. This certainly doesn't help the case for Linux on the desktop.
It is Goatse.
Yes you are.
Window Maker rocks!
http://windowmaker.org/
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Frankly, seeing how Ubuntu totally gimped gdm-setup, removed the ability to use remote-x and a chooser and other such *digressions* they've implemented, I'm on Gnome's side.
Just a few days ago, we were told that everyone is bashing Ubuntu and then a couple days later, we all bashed the crap out of Ubuntu regarding news about their interactions with GNOME. Now we're being told that we're bashing GNOME, even though we were bashing Ubuntu/Canonical all week?
Anyway, when I do need to use Ubuntu, I opt for XUBUNTU.
Dave Neary has an extremely thorough blog post which details problems on all sides that make the issue much more complicated than 'GNOME is being idiotic by not accepting our technology.'
Let's cut the chase: does GNOME provide an alternative notification area spec?
From all written, I can really comment only on the part about "fd.o is broken as a standards body". And all I can say is that pretty much all standard bodies work like that: they rely on cooperation. GNOME didn't take part in talk and later sent list of complaints - instead of drafting new (version of) spec. And GNOME has stopped there, at sending complaints. Standards and specs are not immovable targets, while apparently GNOME childishly refuses to take part in the process by only complaining and calling it "broken." Or I miss something?
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Just because you keep fighting with yourself doesn't make it "two" -- and that's not really called "fighting", what you're doing there... BTW
Leaving aside the question of whether it's good for an open source project to have macho leadership, I think the comparison with Linux (the kernel) isn't valid. Linux, as every slashgeek well knows, is ruled by benevolent dictator. What Linus wants, Linux gets. Or you fork the kernel, which is what most everybody does. I think the last Gnome BD was a guy named Miguel, who has since gone on to other interests.
But perhaps more substantively, Linux differs from Gnome in that Gnome tends to be modular, while Linux is modular only in the sense you can do "modprobe fu ; rmmod bar". So even if Linux didn't have Linus, people are forced by the monolithic nature of the kernel to be more careful with the bits they insert or remove from the kernel. Modifying the kernel is a more surgical operation when compared to the more Lego-like nature of Gnome.
Gnome's modular nature thus makes casual forking (as practiced by Canonical, et al) easier than it is in projects of a more monolithic nature like Linux and, to a lesser extent, KDE.
Am I the only one finding myself increasingly detached from caring about the desktop shell anyhow? It's like, can we just replace the whole desktop shell with a browser and be done with it (even if all the apps are still served from localhost)?
One of the many reasons why I would never consider using an OS other than Linux these days is that on Windows or MacOS there is no (realistic) choice as to which desktop you're going to run. I use fluxbox. My wife and daughter use Gnome. I've used xfce on low-end hardware sometimes. Some people like KDE.
If Gnome has problems, just don't use it. It's not a big deal. Apt-get install fluxbox, or apt-get install xfce4, or whatever desktop you like.
Find free books.
Which seems really old to me. Perhaps I just don't read that many Slashdot threads, but I thought Goatse links had kinda died years ago.
As a side note, the picture seems way smaller than I remember it.
We're a disaster, but I can point out defects in others, therefore everything's fine!
OK, I thought that was bad, but they have a reason. They want people to use desktop pagers instead of maximize and minimize. After I read that, I tried it out to see what was so great, and indeed, having a separate pager for each project you're working on is amazing. So if it works like they expect, they will be pushing a lot of people to a better world (it drives me crazy when I see someone with a 21 inch monitor who maximizes every single window and uses the task bar to switch between them. Totally defeats the point of a large monitor).
Overall I'd rather have those buttons included, but I rarely use them anyway.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Not following now. I have been using cde, fvwm, blackbox, kde... I didn't like Gnome before Ubuntu. Gnome felt non trivial and retarded. Now most UIs are going back to basics. Too much framework overhead and 'clever' UI toys. I don't even have a wallpaper because my screen real estate has a purpose.
Chrome has clue and Amiga UI rocks.
Jeff Waugh worked at Canonical until 2006 and was a member of the GNOME board until 2008. Since then he hasn't had a role in either project. He's been pumping out a series of blog posts cover this whole saga for the last few days.
Part 1
http://bethesignal.org/blog/2011/03/12/relationship-between-canonical-gnome/
Part 2
http://bethesignal.org/blog/2011/03/12/thoughts-on-gnome/
Part 3
http://bethesignal.org/blog/2011/03/12/the-libappindicator-story/
Part 4
http://bethesignal.org/blog/2011/03/13/love-flies-under-the-radar/
The biggest trouble I have with gnome is the designers constant push to force me using my computer their way 'for my own good'. No, sorry, I won't, thank you very much. I've used almost every other GUI / desktop manager around, none has tried so constantly to take away my freedom to organize the way I want to work. To add insult to injury, Gnome color schemes and icon design always seem to lag 10 years behind current fashion. Gnome reminds me of my childhood in the cold war era. Although I was born in western europe, it feels like soviets are rolling their tank divisions through my computer. You wait months in a line waiting for next release, just to hear : 'there's no more resize button, get away, and if you're not happy, praise tell me, comrade, why would you need one ? Didn't you know resize buttons are antisocial ?'. And you end up living in a concrete shack, decorated by shades of gray, praising the vision of the komintern. Just say no.
I am in desktop overload. Between the Mac re-inventing the concept of "pointless flash," Microsoft ripping it off, and Gnome and KDE running in wildly divergent directions "just because they can" I have had about all I can take. I don't want some radically different Gnome Shell. I fucking HATE KDE's Plasma (what ever happened to having stuff run outside of KDE guys?)
We have reached the point where we're all happy imitating each other, and now we're looking for excuses to be different where no reasons actually exist. We won, guys. We all have desktops on our respective platforms. We're all functional. We have window managers, file managers, a fleet of tools that do the work we need, and most of us are happy.
Well some of us. The desktop devs can't sit still it seems. We've all imitated the Microsoft Experience (TM) to the point where it's all too predictable, and we just can't HAVE that...let's pretend we are innovators! To boldly go and all that...and to hell with the users who just want something familiar.
Well I've had enough. I'm sick of the complexity. I'm sick of the SLOWNESS and the memory bloat. And I'm sick of having to dread the next iteration and the flights of fancy of the free desktop community.
So I'm going back. Back to a simple window manager, and the tools needed to make it laptop-ready. My recipe is simple: X-windows + MWM. Xterm for console. Dolphin or Nautilus as a file manager, when needed. To make it laptop-ready, I need Trayer so I can run nm-applet for my network, and gnome's power manager (sorry KDE, your damn plasmids won't work outside KDE.). And hell, that's about all I need.
Smart. Simple. Clean. And under my control.
To hell with the desktop wars.
Another angle, from 1+ year ago: http://blog.lxde.org/?p=361
If Canonical put forth the effort, they could drive GNOME wherever they wanted. Red Hat and Suse dominate GNOME because their developers step up and take charge. They become members of the release team, they become maintainers of important modules. They develop, in the open, technologies that become integral to GNOME. There's no one inside of Canonical that has bothered to do that. One ex-Canonical employee admitted that he was forced to stop contributing to upstream GTK+, stop using upstream's source control system, and stop using upstream's bug tracker. Canonical wanted the development done exclusively in Launchpad with bazaar. [1] That lessens Canonical's influence. If they had allowed that developer to continue contributing upstream, they would have 1) gained goodwill 2) improved GTK+ 3) gotten help from all the other GTK+ developers 4) positioned one of their developers in a position to take a leadership role in the GNOME project. Instead, they shut him down and forced him to work in a little walled garden. Canonical never finished the project, and it was eventually completed by other companies and volunteers.
That was a big missed opportunity.
[1] http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2011/03/collaborations-demise.html?showComment=1299807005600#c2417381301530751354
One point you forgot to obviously include.
- People are too lazy to read whole articles that explain everything and instead base their opinions on someone else's summary.
When I read anything that starts with "The Full Story Behind..." I tend to discount it as just one side's agenda.
To be honest, i don't see what it offers that Gnome doesn't... Maybe I am just to set in my ways when it comes to the desktop but to be honest it really just seems to not be that different. and (At least on my machine) unity starts up about 2 seconds slower than gnome... So I am sticking with gnome.
The big story is that many in leadership positions are asshats? And these egocentric farts are acting like a bunch of bitchy little girls? And their constant need for self-aggrandizement has held back the development of FOSS in general (and GNOME and KDE in particular)?
Wow.
That's not news.
To summarize Neary's rant for the non-GNOME-KDE-Canonical-oriented:
1. the leadership is not well organized
2. the leadership does not communicate well
3. the leadership does not cooperate well
And Neary's solution?
1. bring all discussion into the open (good)
2. eliminate the riff-raff amateurs (elitist)
3. anoint the leadership through invitation-only (even more so)
4. coerce the asshats into behaving and cooperating with a code of conduct (delusional)
Really? And he expects success with a group consisting in large part of infantile prima donnas?
The current model works well enough with all those personalities involved. It's just messy and inefficient and unprofitable and not likely to lead to world domination. But it's a world where anybody can make a copy of the football and take it home with them and Neary's plan doesn't accommodate that. It attempts to offer the imprimatur of what a corporate world needs, to marginalize the 'amateurs' and consolidate power in a select few all at the expense of the chaos that makes FOSS a living thing.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
(it drives me crazy when I see someone with a 21 inch monitor who maximizes every single window and uses the task bar to switch between them. Totally defeats the point of a large monitor).
Every time I've tired to work differently I've found that positioning windows is more work than it's worth. With efficient keyboard/mouse cooperation I can cut and paste between apps with practically zero lag and I don't typically run any monitoring apps that I'd need to keep a permanent eye on. The upside is that all the menus/buttons/panels are in exactly the same place each time. Sometimes I have some docs or specs I'd like to look at and throw that up on my other monitor, but that's more a replacement for looking at a printout.
Complex applications tend to have rather complex interfaces of their own, I have apps with a "main" area in the center with toolbars on top, two levels of menus on the left, toolboxes on the right and status/output windows on the bottom. It's not just one double-ultra wide block of text, it's actually very nice to have a 24" monitor to fit it all.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
and if that guy is characteristic for the gnome community, then i understand why people have problems with that community.
...you never hear GNOME's side of the situation, making a lot of disrespectful comments about GNOME (or the others involved) rather baseless and illogical
Some negative comments about Gnome are not at all baseless, for example the one I am about to make. Gnome is based on an outmoded hack of an attempt to build an OOP based GUI without the benefit of an object-oriented compiler. Instead is uses a collection of nasty hacks and conventions, which which I am deeply familiar because I once was deluded enough to think also that C is just as capable of writing object object oriented code as C++. It isn't. What you end up with is an unholy unmaintainable mess. Full of messy casts, and full of bugs, as Gnome has always been. And unable to express reasonable defaults for things in any powerful or consistent way, the result being that Gnome tends to have lousy defaults for just about everything. Add in a liberal does of hubris from certain Gnome maintainers, and have blinkers on regarding the limitations of the GUI toolkit, and you have a recipe for the nasty mess that Gnome has been from the get-go, and will be until somebody finally does something about it. Thankyou Mark.
Incidentally, these comments apply equally to glib, dbus and various other crappy decorations the Gnome guys have forced on the Linux desktop over the years. At least Bonobo is gone, that goodness for small mercies.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
I see tribalism is alive and well even in the open source community. Go tribalism! Where would reality TV and genocide be without it?
The gnome devs are a bunch of small men with huge egos. Primadonnas, all.
Not trolling; Conical has the resources and community though ubuntu to do it. The open source community - as far as I have seen - has always said that gnome has a heavy case of NIH. Problem with that is it leads to the idea - correct or not - that everybody in the gnome leadership are heavy handed snobs, even if that's not necessarily the case (I'm not calling them that, just noting the perspective I have seen most voiced) and I personally have never met anybody who actually LIKED the gnome-way of doing things (even people in the gnome community), only parts of the end result. Seems to me, the end result could be much better if somebody forked gnome and made them compete with themselves and not "kde verses gnome" a little.
- d
Obligatory: http://inmyholyopinion.com/2007/05/11/gnome-vs-kde/ . This is not the first place I ever found this masterpiece, but it appears to reproduce it (or be the original) in its entirety. FLAME ON!
and I suppose the telecommuting done with most open source projects doesn't work either?
I think the point others are trying to make is that working face to face in a common environment works better. Telecommuting in an open source project may be less optimal but it may also be the only option.
Am I the only one finding myself increasingly detached from caring about the desktop shell anyhow? It's like, can we just replace the whole desktop shell with a browser and be done with it (even if all the apps are still served from localhost)?
Does emacs have an integrated web browser yet? :-)
At first glance, this might seem like an ego infested, alpha male, big mustache, beer belly convention; that the lack of central leadership and process makes doing anything useful impossible.
And yet, here I sit, using my GNOME desktop with all of its eye candy, stability, usability and a fair degree of uniformity. (Yeah, I know, there will be a flood of people who will disagree with my own description of GNOME and I don't care.) GNOME is sometimes difficult to figure out when I try to get under the hood though, so it's not all perfect either.
This is just about all of F/OSS at any scale larger than a handful of developers involved. I might go as far as saying that this is not a problem! It is a fact of how the ecosystem works on larger scales. If, in contrast, you would like to compare this with a large company's operations, you will see the same things! You will see all of this in spite of "strong leadership and clearly defined procedure."
If you want to believe that all of these projects are tearing themselves up into tiny pieces with their little ego wars, you will have to ignore the results these monkeys have delivered so far. For some, it is pretty easy to do. Looking at the comments above, you would not think that GNOME is on par even with Windows 1.0.
There is the context of human reality that needs to be considered. This is EVERYWHERE and in every aspect of life. You will find this in charities, churches, weddings, family Christmas, amusement parks, ski resorts and just about any fun or "positive" place/event you can imagine. It's all a part of the human condition and everyone who doesn't understand it seems to resent and reject it as if it weren't a part of their own DNA.
This is how it works. It might seem ugly and chaotic or ridiculous, but it's how we all work pretty much everywhere. If one thing defines human animals, it would be that we can't advance without an enemy.
AFAIK fd.o only exists as a forum for co-operation between KDE and GNOME. So it's no good for GNOME developers to whine 'fd.o is broken' since it's just as much their responsibility as it is KDE's. No one wants to go back to the mind-numblingly fucked-up design decisions evident in Linux desktops ~10 years ago where, for example, you had a separate application menu for each desktop.
Pre-canned Evolution Links for all those Slashdot holy wars.
Dear Windows user,
If all of the above is hopelessly confusing, please try to imagine this reality. When you buy your next Dell, you can choose a UI layout for MS Windows that goes anywhere from DOS to Windows 7 to Bob. While underneath it is the latest OS. Now, you might PICK your UI layout but not all programs you wish to run support it. So you might suddenly get a Windows 3.1 window mixed with your Aero display. Google says fuck you and does its own thing whatever you picked for its browser.
Now while there are a LOT of choices, two stand out. Gnome which looks a bit like OSX but not a lot and KDE which looks like Fisher Price did a Windows 95 skin. Both can... or could be heavily modified. That is, KDE becomes ever more modible. Gnome becomes less so.
If you have a strong stomach http://ultimateedition.info/Ultimate_Edition_2.8/8.png this blueness is a version of Ubuntu. It is actually a good attempt but the default skin is .... well... you know.
The silly bit is that what people often like to mod is the login screen. GDM was moddible and then it was removed. LESS functionality as a feature. That is Gnome.
The problem is that both Gnome and KDE are suffering from "what to do next". As a desktop both achieved their goal long ago, so they wanted more and more. Is it the task of a desktop package to supply a video player? Especially video player with far less capabilities then easily available packages installed along side but not made the default? Ubuntu is NOT Microsoft after all. MS just can't go including closed sources payed for products for other companies in its offerings less the true cost of running MS and closed source becomes readily apparent (you did pay for Winzip didn't you Windows user)
Ubuntu CAN and does included countless 3rd party apps. It doesn't have to bother with its own meager zip only archive utility, it can use any of the superior opensource apps out there (Windows user, have you not replaced MS internal Zip support with anything more capable).
KDE especially seems to want to create a complete set of utilities... and fails... it is not that these utils are bad by itself, its notepad is far superior to MS Notepad but still hopelessly inferior to other offerings. MS can't offer those others, Ubuntu and other Disro's can. That is why it seems pointless for KDE to spend its efforts on countless apps that will be replaced instantly while its core desktop is lacking behind. Its network manager is not as smooth as that of Gnome. Its multipe windows settings is neither. Yes, they are in theory more configurable (you can set different wallpapers for each screen, you can select which soundcard should be preffered).
But all of it shows that neither Gnome or KDE are focussed enough anymore on what the end user wants. Gnome in its drive to be simple keeps removing the capability to tune Gnome to your liking. KDE remains horribly unfocussed and keeps giving me a messy early Windows experience. BOTH can be tuned to something smoother but geez gods, not everyone wants to.
Other desktop/windows managers? Enlightenment stuck still in some alpha state. The others focusing on low resource usage when you can't even buy a single core netbook anymore. Fully tricked out Ubuntu barely makes my computer tick over, any lower consumption of resources and my computer will shutdown.
That is the state of Linux. Is it bad? No, I still use it daily as my main and preffered desktop but only after heavy tuning. Tuning I have done for years now. I don't mind that much but having to fight Gnome everytime because they removed yet another feature seems such a waste and I just never liked KDE.
Do I really have to do what Vista buyers did at some point and install an older OS to keep working?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
You must be using Ubuntu, cuz Gnome on my Arch desktop is damn fast (on Ubuntu it was getting slow as hell though)
I think you've hit the nail on the head, there, although I'm not sure that its all about the browser. In fact, I think the desktop only ever truly lived on Mac and a few minority systems (Acorn RISC-OS is a good example in which the desktop became really central).
In the early days, a major (unsung) influence of the desktops on Mac and other systems was that it standardised the user interface. Before then, everytbody (Wordstar, Word Perfect, Lotus etc.) invented their own UI paradigm and even tried to prevent others copying it via look-and-feel lawsuits. With the early desktops, however, there was suddenly a single way to open, save, copy files, select blocks, copy, paste etc. and a fairly consistent menu layout across all applications (at least, per-platform - Apple were litigious towards competing desktops).
That didn't last long: pretty soon all the major software houses were trying to distinguish themselves with thier own systems of floating, dockable palettes, wizzards and unique icon designs, and started suing each other over look and feel again. In my experience, typical Windows users never really embraced the desktop (thanks partly to Windows' MDI mode) and just maximised their current application - often the only file manipulation technique they know is "Save as...". Unix/Linux suffered from the usual "Standard? Yeah we have lots of standards!" phenomenon, plus your typical *nix hacker regards a desktop as a mechanism for running 6 instances of vi and 3 xterms on the same screen.
Add to that, the tendency towards monolithic suites of programs with their own workflow management and, often, plug-in/add-on environments (MS Office and Adobe Creative Suite being the prime examples) many users who use their computer for specific jobs don't really need the desktop.
The browser/webapp is one influence - with no standard UI paradigm (or a choice of 3-4 if you used Java) everybody rolled their own. Now "Apps" and iOS/Android have brought the idea of the monolithic app, often with its own UI paradigm (although Android/iOS do provide standard widgets) well and truly to the fore.
Its a pity, really - without the Desktop/GUI as a standarsing mechanism, and application writers more worried about making their product visually distinctive than easy-to-use (and often confusing those things) computers can only get harder to use.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
That was all started back when Miguel was creating the project. Don't get me wrong, I prefer Gnome to KDE but Miguel really screwed things up with one exceptionally poor decision after another - almost all of which is firmly rooted in the NIH-mantra. Its a tradition many were seemingly happy to carry on.
"Wikipedia: Bonobo .... is inspired by Microsoft's OLE and is quite similar to it. .... Bonobo is based on the CORBA architecture."
that this bruhaha existed, only that there was a natural rivalry between two desktop approaches. For myself, I am a fan of Gnome. It is lighter and more efficient than KDE and doesn't have all the adjustability of KDE which I don't need.
It troubles me to see this kind of controversy in the open source community. I see open source as a model to be emulated, not as a structure to be torn at because of ego and techno-snobbery.