So, as things happen to go, Tango seems to be causing quite a bit of controversy. As such, I am writing this here mail on this fine morning of November 08, 2005, to help clarify the situation, based on the threads that I have seen pop up on this list, within the last few days.
Most of you know who I am. Some of you may not. A quote from one of my favorite movies, very accurately describes my position in the current state of things. "I'm the one telling you how it is." However, as a lot of people on here seem quite tense, and would probably take offense to that, here's a more drawn out version. I am the maintainer of the Tango project releases. I also maintain gnome-icon-theme and various other parts of the GNOME desktop. I am on the product design team at Novell/Ximian, and have several years of release engineering, design, and development experience under my belt. I also have a few years of dealing with end users directly, with their issues on the Windows platform. And all of those end users were not professionals in corporate offices, writing word documents and e-mail all day long. Many of them were on the lower end of the middle class scale. They played games, listened to music, downloaded random stupid little desktop toy things randomly off the internet, and spread the use of silly images, horrible desktop themes, and arbitrary crappy desktop toys, through e-mail with family and friends. These people are the ones who really need the free desktop. They are the ones who need simplicity in their computing. They are the ones who need security. Several people on this list have exclaimed how they believe Tango is to conspire against them and their ways of visually identifying themselves through a few icons on a few pieces of software on their desktop. The rest of this mail will be in FAQ form to answer some of those questions. I will also place this FAQ on our web site, so that it may be more visible, and our FAQ can be more useful. Q: Tango is just another icon theme. What is so special about it? A: Tango is not just another icon theme. The project includes an icon theme, yes, but the goals go beyond the icon theme itself. The icon theme is primarily a way of pushing for acceptance of other aspects of the project. There are three parts to the icon side of the project. The Icon Naming Specification, the Tango Artwork Style Guide, and the Tango Icon Theme. The Icon Naming Specification is to improve the ability to use icon themes on the desktop, and to make it much easier for artists to create themes that work on all desktops. The Tango Artwork Style Guide is meant to be a base set of suggestions for all artwork in the Tango project, and a fairly neutral set of guidelines for ISVs to target for creating artwork for their applications. Q: Tango is threatening the visual identity of the different desktops. A: This is not a question. However, Tango does not threaten the visual identity of individual Free and Open Source Software desktops or even applications. The Tango developers have not proposed that Tango be THE one and only theme on any of the GNOME, KDE, or FreeDesktop lists. We will not propose Tango as such, unless the conditions are proper for doing so. Q: Tango is an attempt to push Novell and Gnome branding and style upstream into the desktops. A: While Tango is a project coming out of Novell, and currently primarily consists of Gnome developers and artists, there is no Novell or Gnome branding or style. The style guidelines in Tango are meant to be a comprimise and middle of the road to both the Gnome and KDE artwork styles. The red and green colors in the Tango palette are close to the Novell Red and SUSE green, but are not those colors. The green branding on the SUSE Linux web page, is in fact even brighter than the green in the Tango palette. Q: Does Tango have involvement from members outside the core Ximian community of developers who started the project? A: Yes. In fact, one of the core initial developers, Steven Garrity, is not, and never was, an employee for Ximian. In fact, he is a member of the Mozilla Firefox artwork community, and designed the current logo used in Mozilla Firefox. One KDE user has been contributing quite a bit to the project as well, to get the theme working on KDE 3.5, with the backward compatibility script. Also of note, are members of the Emacs community, who have taken an interest in using the Tango style for the new Emacs logo and icon. Several members of the Ubuntu community have also shown up in our IRC channel, and frequently join in the discussions. There are also discussions occuring on the Ubuntu wiki, about whether to ship the Tango icons as the default in Dapper Drake, the next release. The Lila theme developers have also been joining, and are interested in porting their theme to the Icon Naming Specification. Also, of interest, are the Appeal/Oxygen artists. They have stated that they are quite interested in the naming specification, and also the addition of standard metaphors to the naming specification. As you can see, there are a number of non-Ximian people involved, and the community continues to grow. -- dobey _______________________________________________ xdg mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xdg
