On Sat, Mar 12, 2011 at 9:57 AM, Giovanni Campagna <[email protected]> wrote: > Open Planet GNOME. Almost half of the latest posts relates on GNOME, KDE > and Canonical collaboration story, which is all around libappindicator > and StatusNotifier / dbusmenu. > One year ago, libappindicator was rejected because it needed integration > in GNOME Shell and Gtk+. Three days, Unity was unveiled, and everything > went well with considering Ubuntu community the "bad guys" that forked > GNOME, starting with Ayatana. I of course know this is not true, but > this is the impression I got from the outside (I only started > contributing to GNOME some months later). > Today, on the other hand, things reversed. Public opinion is now that > GNOME rejected, and still is opposing, Canonical per se. And of course, > all the flaming around GNOME Census didn't help here. We don't want a > large part of our user base to consider GNOME Shell a Red Hat project > (again, this is what is perceived from the outside). > First, because this is not true: not just Novell, Intel, and all the > various other companies, but also a great of individuals are making up > what GNOME 3 will be, in Fedora, OpenSuse, Debian, Gentoo, Arch and > maybe Ubuntu as well. > Second, because even if all developers were paid by one organization, we > would have failed if we didn't pass the message that GNOME is a body, a > project, and an organization, but most important GNOME is a community of > people, working for the advancement of free software. > We're about to release GNOME 3. We need the best publicity to have this > adopted by the majority of people. After all, our goal is a GNOME > desktop on every system, right? But if people switch to Xfce or KDE or > Unity (or, ugh, Mac OS and Windows) for political issues with the > project, rather than usability, design, technical bugs, then we're > wasting our precious developer time. > So I think we should give Canonical and the general public a big signal > of collaboration. It doesn't matter if this will have no direct effect > in terms of code and upstreaming of patches, we'll have done the right > thing and people will know. > The small step I'm talking about is support of DBusMenu icons in GNOME > Shell Message Tray. Yes, it does not fit the design (which calls for > notifications, not menus) and it is not used by anything inside GNOME > now. But code is there, in a bug where I proposed for the status area; > it would require some changes to adapt to last Gnome Shell version, but > is mostly fine, and has no external dependencies (implements the DBus > protocol directly). > Anyway, the reason I'm proposing this is not technical (libnotify with > persistence is by far better than StatusNotifier, I think we all agree > here), it is political. > We need to show we're open to technologies developed elsewhere, no > matter how dirty they are. Look at browsers and HTML5, which is the most > horrible application platform ever invented by man: they're all > competing on who is be the most compatible with the others and with the > spec. > I hope this will start a positive discussion, at least to make sure > we're not ignoring this, which is a serious issue from a PR standpoint. > > Giovanni Campagna > > _______________________________________________ > gnome-shell-list mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-shell-list >
GNOME could use some damage control from the marketing and PR teams. I don't think code should be adopted for political reasons only technical ones. _______________________________________________ gnome-shell-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-shell-list
