On 13 February 2013, at 10:39, Alan McKinnon wrote: > … > I don't mean to rain on anyone's parade, but I really do not see the > point of Gnome3 at all. It has no identity of its own … > > So what's the point of Gnome3? > > If people like the Unity-ish bits, they should run Unity. Same with the > KDE and MacOS bits.
Politics? You know the history between Ubuntu / Unity and Gnome, don't you? AIUI Ubuntu did a huge set of patches to Gnome to provide notifications, and they were rejected. AIUI there was a big thing between Shuttleworth and some of the Gnome devs, with Shuttleworth saying that the patches were discussed with Gnome devs; Shuttleworth claimed they'd followed the Gnome devs' advisement, agreed the best way forward and notifications (and their API) had been implemented on the understanding they'd likely be accepted. However it was a couple of different Gnome devs that claimed responsibility for this area, and that they'd decided to do things differently, and that basically Ubuntu's work was an unwelcome code dump - thanks, but no thanks. Thus Ubuntu made Unity, and Gnome carried on with doing it their way. There were a couple of really long articles on Shuttleworth's blog about this at the time. They're actually really interesting reading, if you've got the time for an epic, an insight into the politics or "society" of OSS development. The impression I got was that there was some upset, but actually no-one had deceived anyone or stitched anyone else up, it was just a misunderstanding (or series of misunderstandings) due to the nature of the relationships / hierarchies involved in the two development groups. But I think Shuttleworth was a bit aggrieved and felt the only way to get what he wanted was to develop Unity in house, and Gnome wasn't going to stop what it was doing just because Ubuntu were doing something similar-but-different. Stroller.
