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Has GNOME Rejected Canonical Help? Shuttleworth Responds 181

akgraner writes "When Canonical made the decision to make Unity the default desktop, some questioned the GNOME/Canonical relationship. Adding fuel to this fire was the recent distribution split of revenue generated by Banshee. These decisions caused the Ubuntu, GNOME and even Fedora community members to ask why these things were done. In Dave Neary's 'Has GNOME rejected Canonical help?' post, he states, 'I have repeatedly read Canonical & Ubuntu people say, "We offered our help to GNOME, and they didn't want it."' Neary gives examples in his post of what others have said to back up the 'they didn't want it' claim by Canonical and Ubuntu people. Today, though, Shuttleworth responds on his blog. 'Competition is tough on the contestants, but it gets great results for everyone else.'"
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Has GNOME Rejected Canonical Help? Shuttleworth Responds

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  • Aaron Seigo (Score:5, Informative)

    by molnarcs ( 675885 ) <csabamolnar@gm a i l . com> on Thursday March 10, 2011 @01:39PM (#35444710) Homepage Journal
    Aaron Seigo also has his say on this topic - collaboration's demise [blogspot.com] scroll down to see comments from Shuttleworth and others. Quite nice, some entertaining (in a sad way) flamewar towards the end... I do believe aseigo has a point there, and provides lots of specific examples where collaboration was refused for no good reason. Some juicy bits from the comments:

    also, this is not an odd "oops, we just didn't get around to it" event on the part of GNOME: how's that job D-Bus implementation in GNOME 3 coming? you know, the one that needlessly duplicates the one KDE implements, which we actually designed with thought of cross-project use including getting some feedback from non-KDE devs? or how about the screensaver D-Bus API which we implemented specifically with collaboration with GNOME devs at SUSE, only later to have GNOME not implement it and then complain to us that it used the org.freedesktop namespace? or how about how GNOME devs specifically blocked the formation of a common git repository for fd.o specs, and then when there was finally agreement (after an in-person meeting) insist on implementing it themselves, ignoring that repo had already been started but by people with @kde.org email addresses, and then after taking months to eventually duplicate that effort not implement the most critical part of it: the metadata?

  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 10, 2011 @01:57PM (#35444978)

    Competition is never for good. It causes that competitors starts lowering prices and so on quality. They start pushing products out faster to be first to release something. It just causes problems for all who are part in the development and leading the projects. And customer suffers most of the whole competition. No one actually wins at competition as everyone is stabbing to back to maintain their jobs or marketshare. Even the stores selling the products needs to compete each other with lower price and that means less money what is less people to be hired and less services....

    Ripping competition off does not mean that we need to give monopoly for one company.
    We need teamwork, standards and higer prices and much higer salaries for low lever workers (bosses has got enough already... they should instead be fired)
    We need to discuss about what is best option for most people. We need to support those who are trying to serve minority with own products and services.
    We really need teamwork to push up the whole humanity to actually gain something great. Competition is just like shooting own leg while shooting competitors leg as well and everyone runs slower or not at all and the race is very boring to watch.

    It is smarter and more beneficent to share information to everyone and get everyone to focus same goal.

    Other big mistake in the whole economical world is the revenue. Every money what gets printed, has revenue on it. Every product what gets sold has own revenue on it. Every product what gets manufactured has revenue on it. In the long run, there is less money on the markets than what the total cost of everything is. It just ends up to catastrophic economical situation where poor (80%) people pay everything what rich (5%) people had done to gain more wealth and power.

  • Re:meanwhile... (Score:4, Informative)

    by advocate_one ( 662832 ) on Thursday March 10, 2011 @02:04PM (#35445040)

    My point? Can we stop with the political issues and try to just produce the best, stable, reliable system we possibly can?

    you've obviously never tried to get Gnome devs to change things back... they're absolutely obsessed with making things as unconfigurable as possible for the end user as they believe what they offer is right and the user is an idiot for wanting to changing some options... Just try configuring the screensaver to use images in a directory OTHER than the one they want you to use... it's impossible without doing some manual editing and diving deep... the options are just not there in the screensaver itself...

  • Some more details (Score:5, Informative)

    by halfaperson ( 1885704 ) on Thursday March 10, 2011 @02:09PM (#35445090) Homepage
    Some interesting details from Aaron Seigo in a blog post here. [blogspot.com] While his post makes a pretty strong point, for those of us who are looking for more specific critique, I found the most interesting parts hidden in the comments, such as this, also from Aaron Seigo:

    @Lennart: "If you list this notifier spec, then I can list you the sound theming/naming specs which KDE has shown no interest in."

    that's an incorrect comparison.

    if we (KDE) had offered a bunch of critique on the sound theme spec, had someone come to us with an implementation in Qt and then still gone off and done our own thing instead, then it would be an adequate comparison. but that isn't what happened, is it? :)

    we (KDE) simply haven't gotten around to implementing the sound theming spec. why? as you note, it's not a high priority for us. but i guarantee you that if someone stepped up to do some work on the event sounds infra in kdelibs, stop #1 would be that naming spec.

    also, this is not an odd "oops, we just didn't get around to it" event on the part of GNOME: how's that job D-Bus implementation in GNOME 3 coming? you know, the one that needlessly duplicates the one KDE implements, which we actually designed with thought of cross-project use including getting some feedback from non-KDE devs? or how about the screensaver D-Bus API which we implemented specifically with collaboration with GNOME devs at SUSE, only later to have GNOME not implement it and then complain to us that it used the org.freedesktop namespace? or how about how GNOME devs specifically blocked the formation of a common git repository for fd.o specs, and then when there was finally agreement (after an in-person meeting) insist on implementing it themselves, ignoring that repo had already been started but by people with @kde.org email addresses, and then after taking months to eventually duplicate that effort not implement the most critical part of it: the metadata?

    in contrast, we could see how KDE implemented support for the visual notificatons D-Bus protocol as implemented in GNOME, even though it has evident limitations and is a 100% subset of something we already have in the form of KNotify ... simply to provide compatibility. would GNOME devs do that today? doubtful, because our priorities, as you point out, are indeed different.

    what GNOME needs is not more apologists making excuses for poor behavior but people who will stand up and take ownership of their actions.

  • by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Thursday March 10, 2011 @02:54PM (#35445612) Journal
    The main problem with OS X 10.0 was performance, and this wasn't due to adopting OPENSTEP (not OpenStep - OpenStep is a specification, OPENSTEP is an operating system), but due to replacing code. One of the biggest changes between OPENSTEP 4.2 and OS X 10.0 was replacing Display PostScript with Quartz. This moved to a compositing model, rather than a direct drawing model. This gives a significant performance advantage on modern machines. If you drag a window across the screen on OPENSTEP, every application underneath gets a load of redraw events and has to run some quite processor-intensive code to update the display. With OS X, the GPU just draws a few textured rectangles. With 10.0, however, this was all done in software, and on a 266MHz PowerPC was very slow. Especially since the software paths weren't very well optimised (10.0 was the 'make it work' release, 10.1 was the first 'make it fast' release).
  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 10, 2011 @04:17PM (#35446740)

    It's ridiculous to run a distribution that doesn't have package signing. Especially one that pushes out updates as frequently as Arch does. Arch's complete disregard for basic security measures is truly amazing.

  • Re:meanwhile... (Score:4, Informative)

    by MBGMorden ( 803437 ) on Thursday March 10, 2011 @05:12PM (#35447350)

    Did you not read my post? I don't like the way the whole setup of Gnome Shell 3 behaves. Saying that the minimize function was depreciated because it's no longer relevant in Gnome Shell isn't helping the case.

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