On Tue, Nov 6, 2012 at 1:43 PM, Antoine Jacoutot <ajacou...@bsdfrog.org> wrote: > On Tue, Nov 06, 2012 at 01:38:32PM +0100, Marc Espie wrote: >> Basically, we have a pattern, mostly observed with kde (and a bit with >> gnome) which is really harmful for us. >> >> Those vendors say "we're not in the distribution business, distribution >> problems will be handled by OS vendors. We can break compatibility to >> advance, and not think about it, this is not a problem." >> >> This is a mindset we need to fight, and this has to be a grass-roots >> movement. >> >> The main effect of THAT attitude is to *HURT* the opensource community, >> big time. It's as harmful as the patent portfolio of big business. >> >> Basically, it precludes smaller players from playing on a level field. >> As soon as you're different enough (and that's mostly NOT linux these >> days), you can't keep up. Those distribution problems are LARGE. >> >> They occupy a few people in our team FULLTIME with respect to gnome, they're >> the reason we still DON'T have a full kde4 in our tree (hopefully to be >> addressed shortly), and they're the reason why sometimes we do drop old >> stuff (like killing gtk+1, and people really wanting to kill some gtk2/qt3 >> stuff). >> >> It takes a lot of manpower to address complex distribution issues. If you >> don't have tens of people, it becomes more and more of a losing battle, >> actually... >> >> It's also quickly turning Posix and Unix into a travesty: either you have >> the linux goodies, or you don't. And if you don't, you can forget anything >> modern... >> >> in some cases, you even have some people, who are PAID by some vendors, >> agressively pushing GRATUITOUS, non compatible changes. I won't say names, >> but you guys can fill the blanks in. >> >> I'm pretty sure there's a lot of good intention behind the "progress" in >> recent desktops. But this is turning the field of OS distributions into >> a wasteland. Either you're a modern linux with pulseaudio and pam and >> systemd, or you're dying. So much for the pionneer spirit of opensource, >> where you were free to innovate and do cool things, and more or less have >> interesting software able to run on your machine... > > One could answer you that the BSD community is not involved enough with > upstream. 99% of the development is done on Linux by developers using Linux > -- if you want that to change, some !linux people should get involved in > outside projects... I'm not saying I agree nor disagree with that statement, > I'm just being the devil's advocate. > > -- > Antoine >
I was reading your post to Gnome mailing list and answers from devs and it's hard to find proper words on their "clever" answers. They are probably not much aware about your work in M:tier with Gnome, do they? They don't simply care about "downstream" and they already decided (most of them). Do you have some escape plan for that like some BSD licensed window manager as you are tweaking on Gnome desktop for OpenBSD anyway like WiFi GUI app? I think (can be completely out of course) that there may be pretty good interest in BSD community for some desktop like you are doing for implementation at homes, jobs and so on which is not so different from what people know from other platforms. Not like getting over 1% of Linux market share, but simply, clean and stable desktop for corporate world which can help with more attraction.
