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."

Comments

Some criticisms of Gnome are not baseless

[Daniel Phillips]

...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.