6 ms·

Please do not spread these unfounded conspiracy theories. If you are a developer and you don't agree with direction changes, you don't have to work on them, you

Please do not spread these unfounded conspiracy theories. If you are a developer and you don't agree with direction changes, you don't have to work on them, you can work in the direction of your choosing. AFAIK there are numerous forks of GNOME over the years that are still going.

baybal2 6y ago
> If you are a developer and you don't agree with direction changes, you don't have to work on them I would tell the same to Poettering, Clasen, and co. There is really nobody who obligates them to work on their "innovations" in GNOME with religious zeal if the rest of the project showed no interest, speaking lightly. If nobody wants to work on their stuff, they can't claim "victimhood" as if that happens as a result of somebody's ill intents. I have to reference Torvalds vs. SystemD here as an example how Sievers, Poettering, and co. instantly drew up a picture of kernel community being some kind of a bullying ring when the only thing they did to them was to ignore their (bad quality) patches.
- cycloptic 6y ago
  I would advise holding off judgement on specific individuals unless you have worked with them closely and you have a deep understanding of why certain decisions were made. Again, if you are a developer and you disagree with someone's choices, you are free to take it in your own direction. You do not have to work on anybody else's stuff if you don't want.
  - baybal2 6y ago
    > if you are a developer and you disagree with someone's choices, you are free to take it in your own direction. That would be best said to persons named above. They were free to fork GNOME into their touchscreen based imaginary future, and experiment with it even more freely as a minority group, rather than trying to hijack the project, and getting stalled half-way because of popular pushback.
    - cycloptic 6y ago
      >trying to hijack the project, and getting stalled half-way because of popular pushback Again, please do not spread these unfounded conspiracy theories. I can explain more what I mean by this, but it seems unlikely you are willing to hear what I have to say. I can tell you if you're trying to convince me to be hostile towards any specific developers for any specific project, I will have to decline to get involved with that. You don't have to resort to character assassination, if you have some ideas on a good technical direction for a project, just make the argument and write the code: people will listen if your arguments are sound and your code works.
      - baybal2 6y ago
        It's not a conspiracy theory. GNOME 2 was a project of 100+ developers. TOPAZ was a half-baked tablet UI tech demo from a dozen Red Hat employed devs, later dropping to 7-9 regularly active ones. Tell me what is more to explain about this?
        cycloptic 6y ago
        I personally don't know the full history; you might consider looking for some old blog posts or politely contacting a GNOME developer for an explanation of the history. From what I understand, the run up to mobile was a major source of funding for GNOME 2 from several mobile companies, and that's where all the developers came from, but most of those companies were not able to keep up and failed to iOS/Android. So the funding dried up and Red Hat was one of the few companies that happened to survive because of their other business. That's what I've heard but you should talk to more people who were actually involved in the project back then if you want a more complete answer. (Please assume good faith and don't be hostile, we're all friends here, these are just developers trying to pay the bills like the rest of us)
        sergeykish 6y ago
        There was a story recently, On the Graying of Gnome, comment by boudewijnrempt [1]: > The reason is simple: Nokia. Nokia (and to a much lesser extent, Intel) built up a lot for Maemo and Meego. Just for KOffice/Calligra, at least twenty people were paid to work on the documents application. For all of Maemo/Meego, the total number of people Nokia funded was enormous. > And then Elop, and the burning platform, and Windows, and well, that was 2012. > By 2014, my company was dead, amongst others, and, yeah, the peak had peaked, and the big chance for free software had gone. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25489580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25489580
  - stretchcat 6y ago
    > I would advise holding off judgement on specific individuals unless you have worked with them closely and you have a deep understanding of why certain decisions were made. Is this advice meant to be applied against all people, or just other developers? I certainly wouldn't apply this standard to RIAA lawyers suing kids. I judge them to be worms even though I never worked with them. And don't even get me started on politicians, I've never worked with one but I certainly feel entitled to have harsh opinions about some of them. If the advice is limited in scope to professional peers, then I have to disagree with it; having double standards for people like yourself isn't great advice.
    - cycloptic 6y ago
      For me, it applies to everyone. I try hard to not hold a grudge. It's difficult but emotionally rewarding. If we are trying to be good open source citizens and avoid unnecessary fights, you can apply it just to that.
      - circularfoyers 6y ago
        I just want to say that what you said here and in your other comments in this thread resonated with me in how you approached dissecting issues like ones that have been discussed here. I wish there were more people like you and it's a characteristic I hope I can be more like as well. I respect that you are willing to admit you don't know the full history and implore others to understand why for example, certain decisions were made. It seems as if many people love to theorize about what these are, making correlations which are usually driven more by their feelings than reality. I feel like character assassination was a phrase that I feel aptly describes how I've seen a lot of people treat people like Lennart Poettering. I feel as if some people are unable to separate person from their opinions. Not considering that person like they are more likely to do so if they were in person. I sometimes feel like this attitude is more strongly felt by some people in a community where there is freedom to take a project in another direction if they desired (I know that not everyone has this option). I do think however that the article of this thread expresses their opinion on an issue in a way that it explains how it effects them without resorting to emotional attacks towards the project and it's something I really liked about reading it.
  - addicted 6y ago
    This advice definitely applies to open source developers whose work is out completely in the open. You can literally take millions of lines of code that they may have written wholesale, and change a single word in it that you don’t like. In open source, they have nowhere to hide. If you disagree with a certain decision they have made, you are welcome to take the effort they have put in to implement the hundreds and thousands of other decisions they have made that you do agree with, with a simple “git clone”.
int_19h 6y ago
The problem is that GNOME is not just a DE. By virtue of being a project that's used by RedHat and Ubuntu, it's the closest thing to the standard DE that desktop Linux has at the moment. Worse yet, its developers consciously make design decisions that make it hard to write applications that play well with GNOME without taking a dependency on it - their take on it seems to be that GNOME is a platform, and their main interest is supporting "GNOME apps", even to the detriment of all the rest. Between these two things, deficiencies in GNOME affect a lot of people who didn't necessarily choose to be affected.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Plus Gtk gets picked by several cross platform runtimes, e.g. Java, Uno, Xamarin, wxWidgets, as the "official" UI on Linux.
- cycloptic 6y ago
  I'm not sure what you expect can be done about that. Every desktop is going to have its own set of features and APIs that other desktops don't. That's what they mean by "platform." Should e.g. KDE developers spend less time working on their own features and start contributing more to GNOME, to make GNOME apps work better in KDE, and vice versa? Maybe, but they would have to take the initiative to do it.
  - int_19h 6y ago
    Having unique features is fine, of course. It's when GNOME goes out of its way to make it impossible for DE-agnostic apps to "do the right thing" for ideological reasons, when every other DE supports some kind of lowest common denominator. Here's one famous historical example: https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685 https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685 "I guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or an XFCE app unfortunately ... It is my hope that you are a GNOME app."
    - cycloptic 6y ago
      I don't see how that is an example of ideological reasons, or how that contradicts what I said. It seems like exactly what I was saying -- GNOME, Ubuntu and XFCE all have their own separate APIs for things. I've seen that issue posted here and on reddit so many times and I never understood why anyone considers it any more significant than all the other times a random open source project removed a deprecated API or did an incompatible version bump. Yes, I get it, it's frustrating when upstream is a moving target, but that's exactly what he's saying. You can choose to follow the moving target or you can target a platform that moves slower. And because I have to keep saying this, that is a non-issue now anyway. XFCE supports the new app indicator protocol, and since Ubuntu dropped unity their support for it is available as a standard GNOME extension: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/615/appindicator-support/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/615/appindicator-supp...

baybal2 6y ago

> If you are a developer and you don't agree with direction changes, you don't have to work on them I would tell the same to Poettering, Clasen, and co. There is really nobody who obligates them to work on their "innovations" in GNOME with religious zeal if the rest of the project showed no interest, speaking lightly. If nobody wants to work on their stuff, they can't claim "victimhood" as if that happens as a result of somebody's ill intents. I have to reference Torvalds vs. SystemD here as an example how Sievers, Poettering, and co. instantly drew up a picture of kernel community being some kind of a bullying ring when the only thing they did to them was to ignore their (bad quality) patches.

cycloptic 6y ago
I would advise holding off judgement on specific individuals unless you have worked with them closely and you have a deep understanding of why certain decisions were made. Again, if you are a developer and you disagree with someone's choices, you are free to take it in your own direction. You do not have to work on anybody else's stuff if you don't want.
- baybal2 6y ago
  > if you are a developer and you disagree with someone's choices, you are free to take it in your own direction. That would be best said to persons named above. They were free to fork GNOME into their touchscreen based imaginary future, and experiment with it even more freely as a minority group, rather than trying to hijack the project, and getting stalled half-way because of popular pushback.
  - cycloptic 6y ago
    >trying to hijack the project, and getting stalled half-way because of popular pushback Again, please do not spread these unfounded conspiracy theories. I can explain more what I mean by this, but it seems unlikely you are willing to hear what I have to say. I can tell you if you're trying to convince me to be hostile towards any specific developers for any specific project, I will have to decline to get involved with that. You don't have to resort to character assassination, if you have some ideas on a good technical direction for a project, just make the argument and write the code: people will listen if your arguments are sound and your code works.
    - baybal2 6y ago
      It's not a conspiracy theory. GNOME 2 was a project of 100+ developers. TOPAZ was a half-baked tablet UI tech demo from a dozen Red Hat employed devs, later dropping to 7-9 regularly active ones. Tell me what is more to explain about this?
      - cycloptic 6y ago
        I personally don't know the full history; you might consider looking for some old blog posts or politely contacting a GNOME developer for an explanation of the history. From what I understand, the run up to mobile was a major source of funding for GNOME 2 from several mobile companies, and that's where all the developers came from, but most of those companies were not able to keep up and failed to iOS/Android. So the funding dried up and Red Hat was one of the few companies that happened to survive because of their other business. That's what I've heard but you should talk to more people who were actually involved in the project back then if you want a more complete answer. (Please assume good faith and don't be hostile, we're all friends here, these are just developers trying to pay the bills like the rest of us)
      - sergeykish 6y ago
        There was a story recently, On the Graying of Gnome, comment by boudewijnrempt [1]: > The reason is simple: Nokia. Nokia (and to a much lesser extent, Intel) built up a lot for Maemo and Meego. Just for KOffice/Calligra, at least twenty people were paid to work on the documents application. For all of Maemo/Meego, the total number of people Nokia funded was enormous. > And then Elop, and the burning platform, and Windows, and well, that was 2012. > By 2014, my company was dead, amongst others, and, yeah, the peak had peaked, and the big chance for free software had gone. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25489580 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25489580
- stretchcat 6y ago
  > I would advise holding off judgement on specific individuals unless you have worked with them closely and you have a deep understanding of why certain decisions were made. Is this advice meant to be applied against all people, or just other developers? I certainly wouldn't apply this standard to RIAA lawyers suing kids. I judge them to be worms even though I never worked with them. And don't even get me started on politicians, I've never worked with one but I certainly feel entitled to have harsh opinions about some of them. If the advice is limited in scope to professional peers, then I have to disagree with it; having double standards for people like yourself isn't great advice.
  - cycloptic 6y ago
    For me, it applies to everyone. I try hard to not hold a grudge. It's difficult but emotionally rewarding. If we are trying to be good open source citizens and avoid unnecessary fights, you can apply it just to that.
    - circularfoyers 6y ago
      I just want to say that what you said here and in your other comments in this thread resonated with me in how you approached dissecting issues like ones that have been discussed here. I wish there were more people like you and it's a characteristic I hope I can be more like as well. I respect that you are willing to admit you don't know the full history and implore others to understand why for example, certain decisions were made. It seems as if many people love to theorize about what these are, making correlations which are usually driven more by their feelings than reality. I feel like character assassination was a phrase that I feel aptly describes how I've seen a lot of people treat people like Lennart Poettering. I feel as if some people are unable to separate person from their opinions. Not considering that person like they are more likely to do so if they were in person. I sometimes feel like this attitude is more strongly felt by some people in a community where there is freedom to take a project in another direction if they desired (I know that not everyone has this option). I do think however that the article of this thread expresses their opinion on an issue in a way that it explains how it effects them without resorting to emotional attacks towards the project and it's something I really liked about reading it.
- addicted 6y ago
  This advice definitely applies to open source developers whose work is out completely in the open. You can literally take millions of lines of code that they may have written wholesale, and change a single word in it that you don’t like. In open source, they have nowhere to hide. If you disagree with a certain decision they have made, you are welcome to take the effort they have put in to implement the hundreds and thousands of other decisions they have made that you do agree with, with a simple “git clone”.

int_19h 6y ago

The problem is that GNOME is not just a DE. By virtue of being a project that's used by RedHat and Ubuntu, it's the closest thing to the standard DE that desktop Linux has at the moment. Worse yet, its developers consciously make design decisions that make it hard to write applications that play well with GNOME without taking a dependency on it - their take on it seems to be that GNOME is a platform, and their main interest is supporting "GNOME apps", even to the detriment of all the rest. Between these two things, deficiencies in GNOME affect a lot of people who didn't necessarily choose to be affected.

pjmlp 6y ago
Plus Gtk gets picked by several cross platform runtimes, e.g. Java, Uno, Xamarin, wxWidgets, as the "official" UI on Linux.
cycloptic 6y ago
I'm not sure what you expect can be done about that. Every desktop is going to have its own set of features and APIs that other desktops don't. That's what they mean by "platform." Should e.g. KDE developers spend less time working on their own features and start contributing more to GNOME, to make GNOME apps work better in KDE, and vice versa? Maybe, but they would have to take the initiative to do it.
- int_19h 6y ago
  Having unique features is fine, of course. It's when GNOME goes out of its way to make it impossible for DE-agnostic apps to "do the right thing" for ideological reasons, when every other DE supports some kind of lowest common denominator. Here's one famous historical example: https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685 https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/3685 "I guess you have to decide if you are a GNOME app, an Ubuntu app, or an XFCE app unfortunately ... It is my hope that you are a GNOME app."
  - cycloptic 6y ago
    I don't see how that is an example of ideological reasons, or how that contradicts what I said. It seems like exactly what I was saying -- GNOME, Ubuntu and XFCE all have their own separate APIs for things. I've seen that issue posted here and on reddit so many times and I never understood why anyone considers it any more significant than all the other times a random open source project removed a deprecated API or did an incompatible version bump. Yes, I get it, it's frustrating when upstream is a moving target, but that's exactly what he's saying. You can choose to follow the moving target or you can target a platform that moves slower. And because I have to keep saying this, that is a non-issue now anyway. XFCE supports the new app indicator protocol, and since Ubuntu dropped unity their support for it is available as a standard GNOME extension: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/615/appindicator-support/ https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/615/appindicator-supp...