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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."
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.
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.
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.
GNOME has a long history of "NIH"
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. Sadly, NIH is almost always a sign of significant personality flaws. This is turn easily feeds back into the lack of leadership, lack of formalization, lack of documentation, and lack of communication. All are traits of people who are actively trying to hide their work from peers until, hopefully, it can be forced down their throat within minimal review and criticism. Though admittedly, there are other factors which can justify this type of behavior too; especially if you're trying to jam it down the throats of completely unreasonable NIH personalities. Doesn't make it right, but it doesn't make it understandable.
Again, I use Gnome daily but it doesn't change the fact that Miguel created a really bad architecture, creating poor implementations of various technologies because of NIH, then created a collection of like-minded yes men, who then proceeded to create one kludge after another trying to fix the cluster fuck of bad ideas and implementations originally created by Miguel. Literally, the project has been primed for this cluster fuck since its inception. And you note, both editorials clearly say, "NIH" and that the GNOME project is structurally broken. I've been literally saying this for years now. I've not followed Gnome for several years now and none of this is the least bit surprising to me. Not one bit.
While the telecommute comments are pretty dumb, he is correct in that communication for any large project is required - though physical presence absolutely is not., contrary to his assertions. Regardless, they desperately need to adopt some formalized process if they hope to salvage the project. Looking at projects like Python's PEPs would be an excellent start. But then again, for them to move in that directly likely isn't possible with the current mix of personalities because it means being reviewed and criticisms early and often, which all too often is in stark contrast with the personalities involved.
I seriously hope they get things resolved. But if they don't, KDE is looking pretty strong these days. I just don't want to have to have both sets of widgets and frameworks loaded to maintain my preferred applications.