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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."
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too late, and doing it their own way, going further away from what most people want in a desktop, and Unity is already outdated when you compare it to what's happening in the tablet world.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.
blog post 1 and blog post 2.
Enjoy.
-chris
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.
Which is kind of what you'd expect from Gnome - claim that Freedesktop doesn't work and that no ne understand how Gnome works, it's all just a big misunderstanding and everyone is equally to blame.
Bullshit.
However, it is a moot point now: with GNOME3 removing minimize and maximize buttons and more-or-less forcing people into using workspaces I will have to seek a replacement. I just happen to like minimize and maximize buttons and my current workflow, I don't want to have to learn a new one just for the sake of it being new.
Yeah, it is annoying how they keep taking functionality out when there's no rational justification in terms of usability. My 11-year-old daughter was running Gnome on Ubuntu Lucid, and she had her login screen all customized so it looked cool according to her 11-year-old criteria. Then I upgraded her to Maverick, and her customization went away. I spent some time trying to help her get it working again, and basically learned that it's impossible (or would require more wizardry than I possess). Try explaining to an 11-year-old why an upgrade has removed a feature that she was using and wanted. Is there some usability improvement due to removing this capability for customization? Of course not.
But that's the beauty of open source. We have fluxbox, xfce, KDE, ...
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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.
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?