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

For those without the patience...

[Spyware23]

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/

Re:For those without the patience...

[Daniel_Staal]

If GNOME isn't easy to understand then I suggest you fix your design issues. it is a GUI not a rocket ship.

if GNOME isn't easy to understand how can anyone including mark shuttle worth understand it?

GNOME is two things: It is an set of code, and it is the organization and group that writes and maintains that code. It is the latter that the article is referring to. It's not easy to understand how the community of GNOME operates. And trying to get something done without understanding the community is likely to mean you'll not get anywhere, because you haven't convinced the community that it needs to be done.

Re:For those without the patience...

[Anonymous Coward]

Freedesktop.org is not a standards body. From their website, "freedesktop.org is not a formal standards organization[...]" Anyone can get subscribe to the mailing list and propose a "standard." Anyone can get a Bugzilla account and a git repository there. They encourage "de facto specifications" - if you're already doing it and think someone else should do it too, write it up and send it out.

Mark Shuttleworth does not understand how GNOME works. He believes there is technical leadership, either somewhere in the GNOME foundation or elsewhere. There isn't. New directions are taken in GNOME by people who are able to motivate. If you can't code and can't convince someone else to code with you, you won't get anything done in GNOME.

GNOME is not easy to understand. This is evidenced by Mark Shuttleworth, a very smart man and a leader of one of the largest GNOME-pushing Linux distributions, not understanding how GNOME works. For that to happen, GNOME must be difficult to grok. It's also evidenced by the chatter on Slashdot and elsewhere that suggests that GNOME's leaders should step up and lead. There are no leaders. No one is in control. Maintainers of individual modules do what they want, guided by consensus, intuition, and experience.

Deep mistrust has developed between Canonical, KDE, and GNOME. The last few weeks' explosion has made that clear. Everyone mistrusts everyone else.

Difficult people are prominent in each of these projects. GNOME has their fair share of jerks. Check the mailing lists around the time of the StatusNotifier spec proposals and you'll see who's who. KDE also has their fair share of jerks. See the same mailing lists at around the same time. Canonical also has jerks, although this may be less clear. Their employees tend to have less of a presence on public mailing lists than GNOME or KDE people. To many in the free software community, not developing upstream or contributing upstream makes you a jerk. That's up to you to decide.

Behind doors conversations are poison, as we can see from Mark Shuttleworth's blog post. He claims that Ted Gould (a Canonical employee) had a conversation with Jon McCann (a GNOME developer) and that in that conversation, Jon said libappindicator sounded great. Mark wasn't present at this conversation. Jon McCann claims the conversation never happened. As far as I know, Ted hasn't weighed in yet (but I doubt he'll contradict Mark). We outsiders can have no idea what really happened. What we do know is that, without a public record, this is a huge clusterfuck of a communication problem. If they had held the conversation on IRC with a logger, or on a mailing list, or documented the conversation on a mailing list or a Wiki afterwards, this whole blow up might not be so painful. in the free software world, conversations must be public.

For people to work together, they must be in the same place. The Ubuntu Developer Summit, GUADEC (GNOME coference), aKademy (KDE conference), and regular hackfests (often sponsored jointly by Canonical and the GNOME foundation) show that being together in the same place helps.

I'm not sure what you're calling bullshit in your post. You didn't really explain. I've tried to show that the claims in the original article seem to be true. Perhaps you think the claims don't go far enough, and the author should have singled out GNOME for punishment or blame?

Aaron Seigo (from KDE)'s perspective

[chrisl456]

blog post 1 and blog post 2.

Enjoy.

Yawn.... another FOSS soap opera

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Kubuntu

[clang_jangle]

I don't use ubuntu but I support a bunch of people who do, and usually recommend xubuntu, which has the xfce4 desktop. Ubuntu users might want to get familiar with it now so that when gnome follows kde in snatching defeat from the jaws of victory you'll be undisturbed. sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop for ubuntu or kubuntu users.

Re:Gnome and KDE both suck

[clang_jangle]

Spoken like someone who doesn't know how to configure wmaker. It's as fugly or beautiful as you make it. Fluxbox is extremely good as well.

Jeff Waugh's Summary

[Anonymous Coward]

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/

Re:GNOME's own alternative?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're sort of missing something. FD.o is a neutral place for developers from disparate desktop environments to hold discussions and throw around ideas that can be used by everyone. The discussion about the notification spec took place on the xdg@ list after it was proposed in mid-December, 2009. You can find the thread in the archives. Before being proposed as the StatusNotifierSpec, it was the KNotifierSpec. Mostly KDE developers participated in the discussion, because they had already been discussion the spec for a while. Canonical developer Ted Gould sent a message to GNOME's desktop-developer-list@ in mid-January, 2010 to GNOME developers know that a new notification spec was being developed. Dan Winship, a GNOME developer, reads the spec and voices his concerns with in on the xdg@ list. He and Aaron Seigo from KDE lightly flame each other for a while.

A month later, GNOME developer Colin Walters (from Red Hat) asks about Canonical's libappindicator (an implementation of the StatusNotifierSpec) and its relation to GNOME. There aren't too many posts, some people like it and some people don't. Later that day, Ted Gould formally proposes the library for inclusion as an external dependency. (Note: in GNOME, an app is free to use any library it wants as long as it is dynamically loaded. Proposing the module as an external dependency allows an application to statically link the library.)

So it seems like Dan Winship was one of the few GNOME people actually aware that the spec was being drafted and subscribed to the xdg@ list. Canonical began implementing the spec way before it was formally drafted, and way before they notified any GNOME people that development was even going on. By the time someone in GNOME who was qualified to implement the spec heard about it, it was already well on its way to done. When he went to talk about it with the authors, flaming ensued. You can decided who started it.

There's no conspiracy or childishness on Canonical or GNOME's part. They just weren't communicating well.