Hi. On So, 2017-04-09 at 15:44 -0400, Walter Vargas wrote: > > Canonical's recent decision about not maintaining unity for Ubuntu makes it > quite clear that Desktop is not the priority anymore, IoT and Mobile are the > priority now, Hah. Before it was the Cloud™, SOA, IVI, other form factors, ... I think it's fair to say that we've felt this threat for at least a decade.
Now that doesn't necessarily make your point moot, but it may give a perspective on why people seem to be relatively calm about the newest coolest kid on the block. > > and now GitHub is the world leading development platform. True. But it wasn't the case five years ago and it might not be the case anymore in five years. I interpret your statement such that we should focus more on being on Github, because it's where everybody else is and we surely want them to make GNOME better. I don't think we want to pay any price associated with getting the maximum number of potential contributors. The question then becomes whether we are willing to pay the price associated with "switching to Github". For certain values of "switching to Github", the answer is probably no; see below. > > Since the primary goal is to provide a developer experience that does not act > as > a barrier to new contributors, I believe our primary goal is to produce excellent Free Software to enable as many people as possible to do their computing. But there will surely be someone who would argue otherwise and the more people you ask the more answers you will get. Providing a smooth contribution experience is certainly a means to achieve that goal. And I think we have to work on making it much more smooth for people to produce code. > > Should we be more pragmatic about that and reconsider GitHub as an option? That's a fair question to ask. I am wondering about that myself for a while now. I believe we are reluctant to accept having to rely on a party sitting between us and the people wanting to make GNOME better. The reasons are manyfold. My personal objection is that requiring someone to agree to the ToS of a third party is a lot to ask for. We don't control the third party and it may very well decide to not conduct business with certain people we would want to be able to contribute. Just to invent a scenario: American companies may not be allowed to deal with embargoed countries or people living there. Now that's not a concrete issue right now (AFAIK) but it may well become one. (Also, the Github ToS, in particular, have stirred up some debate recently) On the other hand, it's probably fair to say that most people do have a Github (Google, Facebook, ...) account already, so we're arriving here: > > Is it a dogmatic foundational decision not to evaluate GitHub because it is > not > Free Software? To me, not being Free Software feels like the straw that breaks the camel's back. But it's not that we're not using Github. We have invested some time to have our self-hosted git mirrored to Github. Some people also accept patches via Github. Are you thinking of using Github more? Cheers, Tobi _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
