I've been a little surprised at some of the posts in this thread. As some others have pointed out, I do not believe it is fair to state that anyone is forcing you to use any particular software (such as PulseAudio, or udev), as it is your choice to use Linux or not in the first place. Why do these same people not complain about being "forced" to use the Linux kernel? After all, it would certainly be tricky to install Gentoo on metal, and not use the Linux kernel.
As an open source developer and as an open source consumer (and of course I consume far more open source efforts than I contribute), I think it is important to keep in mind that we are benefiting from the generosity of others. I think the idiom, "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth" is probably appropriate to this discussion. Another important point that has been said by others that I think is worth highlighting is that there are many ways to go without using PulseAudio if you really want ALSA. Gnome happens to depend on it, but that's the choice of Gnome developers and not us. I happen to work on an open source server product that requires the use of MongoDB. There are many community users who complain about that, as they would rather us use the DB of their preference (PostgreSQL is a common request). I don't disagree that it would be cool if my project could use either DB and let the users go with their own choice, but it's not a priority for us due to the long list of other features and bugs that we need to deal with. It's so much simpler for us to only support one database, and so it allows us to deliver a lot of other cool features instead. I think that is a reasonable decision on our part, and some of our community members disagree and that's fine. I don't think we or they feel any animosity about it. It would significantly increase our QE and development costs if we were to support other DBs. I think Gnome and PA can be thought of in a similar light. I will divulge that I happen to like Gnome and PulseAudio, and so consider me biased. I did find the /usr thing with udev to be kind of inconvenient since I did happen to have a separate /usr, but I dealt with it and am grateful to have a free udev that I can use. Note that I'm not saying you need to like or use these technologies - I just ask that you realize that there are pretty good reasons for Gnome to simplify their dependency list, and that you do still have great freedom in your software choices. There are many great alternatives to Gnome. Open Source software is incredible, and I think it's exciting to think about all the many choices it has brought us so far. Any one of us could fork any OSS project we wanted at any time and tweak it for what we want and share with the world. That is really good. -- Randy Barlow
