On April 22, 2005 15:27, Cory Syvenky wrote: > I wonder how many KDE/Gnome features have been added as a direct result of > 'borrowing' an idea from Apple (or Microsoft for that matter). Look at
a lot. and vice versa. there's nothing inately wrong with that, either. a good idea is a good idea. this isn't an interpretive dance where personal expression is the ultimate goal; the goal is to create a good environment within which to work. it's simply not possible to come up with completely original ideas for most aspects of the desktop that also good ones. 20 years ago, sure. but today a lot of questions have been answered in numerous ways. i'd go so far as to say that if you were presented with a completely unique desktop, you wouldn't use it. > No thanks. I've heard KDE plans to integrate a new system search, > can you say Apple's spotlight? you could, but then you'd miss out on the purpose of Tenor which is not a search system but a contextual linkage engine (upon which one can build a "search engine"). when the Tenor project was started, Spotlight hadn't been mentioned at all in the media, either. i'd also note that since Tenor went public we've seen Apple and Beagle both snag concepts we put forward for their own use. and that's cool; that's how research SHOULD work. (disclaimer: i'm one of the two main architects for Tenor) > I'd have to give Gnome more credit for at least trying. um, not saying they aren't trying, but for what exactly? > Without putting too much thought into it, here's the list of real > innovation. What else is there? providing the source along with the applications. a groupware client that supports more than one groupware server out of the box, and each at the same level. pervasive cryptography. built in network transparency at the application level. i18n and l10n like never seen before. a context-and-web-services-driven media player (amaroK) open standards for office documents a web server in your panel ;) .. i'm sure if i thought about it more i could come up with more. but there's an important point here that you are completely missing, and probably it's what really frustrates me to hear people like yourself say these things: you can't innovate beyond the state of the art until you're capable of the state of the art. not so long ago we weren't even close to parity with Windows or MacOS. despite both Microsoft and Apple peddling faster than they ever have before on their desktops, we've pretty much "caught up". that's an amazing achievement. KDE 2.0 was released in October 2000. that was the first release of an open source desktop that had the scope necessary to provide a modern desktop environment. in a little over 4 years KDE has gone from beta quality libraries and a few apps to production ready stability and a ton of applications. ditto for GNOME and other projects. to now say "well, where's the innovation?" is a bit like asking the guy who just ran a marathon why he "only" ran 26 miles that day. in fact, this desktop thing is sort of like a triatholon, where innovation is the second leg. MS and Apple were already out of the water and getting on their bikes just as we were getting our feet wet. and lo! we bridged the distance. to ask why we aren't leading the bicycle pack at the moment sounds a bit stupid. ignoring the context of current reality and the efforts that the thousands of people involved have put into the open source desktop scene so we could get to the point that we can start innovating seems a bit smarmy. feh, i say, feh! on the bright side, there are so many things happening right now on so many fronts that i'm fairly confident innovation won't be a problem over the next couple of years. > - virtual desktops you can get them on OS X and Windows too. damn them! ;) > - fish:// this actually came from midnight commander IIRC, and there were OSes that certainly offer similar capabilities. damn them! > How 'bout a real clipboard? that would be nice, yes. hopefully we'll have the interested people to do that in time for KDE4, but it requires a lot of cooperation across the board, primarily via FD.o and that means things take more time. > Why replicate Windows Explorer and rename it Konqueror? > Combine a browser and file explorer, original? no, that idea is not unique. nor is it a bad one. but in any case "replicating Windows Eplorer" is not what Konqueror is. it's certainly one way of viewing it from a user's perspective (though not the only one), and that has some benefits such as familiarity and, well, it being not a horrible idea. we really screwed the pooch on a few UI decisions there, however. i'm eager to help fix them for KDE4 =) -- Aaron J. Seigo Society is Geometric
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