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A few thoughts from a former GNOME release manager... FLOSS developers, particularly those writing code in their spare time, hack on whatever they feel like. U
by jdub 16y ago
A few thoughts from a former GNOME release manager...
FLOSS developers, particularly those writing code in their spare time, hack on whatever they feel like. Usually because they find it fun.
This is why we have jokes about the number of people writing IRC clients in the 90s, which apply to the number of people writing Twitter clients this decade. :-)
GNOME is a meritocratic collective of individuals (some of whom work for companies with an interest in GNOME) with a degree of aligned vision and values, and an incredibly thin layer of artificial technical leadership (mainly represented by the Release Team).
It's not a command-and-control culture. People work on things because they want to, are paid to, or (in many cases) both.
One thing to keep in mind: There is a sense of GNOME being a "team" of like-minded souls, so distinctions between vision and values between projects (such as Firefox and Pidgin) may stand out to developers more than they are obvious to users.
What one developer finds fun may be another hacker's dental surgery nightmare. There are always new ideas to muck around with, new projects to contribute to, and new people to work with. For these reasons, directing FLOSS developer energy is not a zero-sum game.
When someone says "GNOME and KDE developers should combine their talents and work together, then they'd all be better off (as will users)", my response is this: Are you HIGH? These people may share some common values, but in large part, their vision and values are different enough that it would not make any sense at all, let alone be fun.
Should all the NoSQL folk stop working on competing stacks, and work together for the "betterment" of themselves and their users? Hell no.
Give it a few years and there'll be obvious frontrunners which have been better maintained, supported, managed and better suit real requirements (cf. MySQL and PostgreSQL in the FLOSS RDBMS world), but for now, get the fuck out of the way of innovation!
There are long and interesting stories behind the specific projects the author raises -- the Epiphany browser and the Empathy IM client -- but they're a bit long for this post.
I'm suspect the author would be surprised to find out that the existence of Epiphany and Empathy is much more to do with a sense of exceptionalism on the part of Firefox and Pidgin than of GNOME. :-)
Reality check: Most GNOME users still use Firefox and Pidgin anyway (at least until Ubuntu shipped Empathy in Lucid, and which will be much more convincing in Maverick).
- bad_user 16y agoIn Lucid I just removed Empathy and installed Pidgin ... how the hell can a messenger client ship without the ability to block annoying users/spam?
- goplexian 16y agoI appreciate your points, thanks for taking the time to reply. I'd be more than happy to hear more about the stories behind Epiphany and Empathy that you hinted about if you have some more time!
- mycroftiv 16y agoA very nice reply, thank you. I believe though that there is a real problem of code reuse vs. reinventing the wheel in the FOSS community. One of the main rationales of open source is collaboration, but very often, developers choose to begin new projects rather than attempting to collaborate on an existing codebase. Instead of harmonious group effort, we end up with a "tower of babel" of competing projects. Choice and variety are good, but they need to be balanced against the principle of trying to produce the maximum amount of value from an investment of time and energy. Sometimes duplication of effort means that no new value is added by re-implementing the same functionality present in other software.
- jdub 16y ago"Choice and variety are good, but they need to be balanced against the principle of trying to produce the maximum amount of value from an investment of time and energy." vs. "I feel like writing a high performance, multi-node key value store, just to prove that I can" OR "I enjoy coding with X, and I think I could make a really cool browser with it" OR any other number of motivations. Some of those motivations produce a Redis, a guiding principle, a community, co-developers and a market. Some of the produce a SourceForget project that is never heard from again, let alone improved beyond alpha quality. But that's a lot of flowers blooming, and there's no shortage of developers realising that FLOSS is where the action -- and practical education! -- is. DVCS and social coding venues like GitHub make it all the more easy to start, share, and improve. You'll probably see all of that as messy and inefficient. Most experienced FLOSS developers see it as a necessary by-product of open learning, development and innovation -- our process.
- mycroftiv 16y agoActually, I believe we are in agreement, for the most part. In particular, I think that DVCS are immensely helpful for encouraging "piggyback" development. It may be that the obstacles to code re-use and cooperation are mostly technical issues that can be resolved with the use of good tools. I am completely committed to free software as both a user and developer - any criticisms I have are motivated solely by a desire to improve the quality of the software produced by the community and encourage its widespread adoption.
- carussell 16y agoI'm suspect the author would be surprised to find out that the existence of Epiphany and Empathy is much more to do with a sense of exceptionalism on the part of Firefox and Pidgin than of GNOME. Do tell.