Hi all, My god, I am a little surprised at the discussion that has resulted from a small comparison I made on my blog. :P I want to be entirely clear in my opinion here - I was not criticising Novell for these changes, just making the comparison.
In terms of the 'design behind closed doors', I think its a really tough one to quantify and draw an opinion from. Sure, in a perfect world, everything would be developed up front, in public and be subject to full public discussion and commentary. I think for day to day GNOME work and development - work that does not mean fundamental changes to the user interface philosophy and direction of GNOME, this is pragmatic and workable solution. For fundamental changes to GNOME infrastructure or interface, the problem runs a little deeper, and I can identify with the bike shed analogy. I think the problem is that to really push forward and make fundamental innovative decisions, it requires someone to step up and make a solid stand. The problem of course is that in a large distributed project such as GNOME, few people want to step up and make such a stand and risk treading on so many toes. I think this is becoming an increasing problem for GNOME. As many of you will know, I used to be heavily involved in the KDE project, and I defected over to GNOME because I thought that the GNOME community (a) had a finer understanding and appreciation of usability and (b) the community had the balls to stand up and make decisions. In recent months there seems to be some fragmentation in the community and little spats like this really don't help. As I blogged about last night (http://www.jonobacon.org/viewcomments.php?id=640), it seems there is a cyclical wave of community confidence and ability that moves between KDE and GNOME - and this is most certainly derived from the social scenario of developing software within a public community, and the competition and opinions that that infers. So in summary, I can identify with both sides - I can sympathise with developing going on behind closed doors to at least get *a* solution up and running without it turning into a talking shop, but I can also understand Jeff's concern that such things are not really under the kind of 'community' banner that we would all like it to be. Its just a same we have such 'sides'. The concern I have is that unless some of these problems are resolved, Topaz is only going to be a pipe dream - a pipe dream that no-one wants to stand up and kick off due to fear that anyone standing up and making a decision will involve a community backlash. With fundmental changes like ones discussed in Topaz, we really need a decision to be made at some point. I would be happy to stand up and propose JonoGNOME, but I suspect you would all laugh at me and poke me with a stick. :P Cheers, Jono _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
