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Re: Little bit OT but a good reading.
by Eric Laffoon on Tuesday 04/Mar/2003, @19:52
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This is certainly a much mellower Miguel than in years past, not to mention more pragmatic. That's good to see. Of course old habits die hard so he is still waving the "royalty issue" around. I think it's a dead issue because clearly it has proven to be a winner. We get solid organized development of our toolkit for GPL'd software and commercial entities get that plus a company to support them. As has been pointed out many of Gnome's partners are beginning to adopt QT. Clearly this has been a win for everyone except Gnome. Also Ximian proves bytheir existance that some business entity somewhere being involved can be a benefit. Many company support the Linux kernel in various ways too so what it really comes down to is how a partictular project should be supported. In my opinion IBM and sun can afford to pay for support and if I were going to sell QT based software it would cost me a lot less than to develop M$ .NET.
While I'm sure it was sad for Miguel to see KDE running where Gnome was started it still has some wry humor for others. Miguel seems to be basing the ongoing existance of Gnome on the red herring of his "royalty issue" and the emotional and time investment of it's developers. The second is understandable from a developer perspective but in no way should be made an argument for any reason for people to adopt it. Other factors ought to prevail for users.
It was interesting that he made this statement. "I personally (because of the emotional component described before), would like to see more work be done on the Gnome desktop and less on replicating infrastructure." Petrely's recent article soundly thrashed them for having abandoned their focus on infrastructure. Clearly this is crucial for how it affects your app. With Quanta we sacrificed a lot of little stuff to establish a powerful "infrastucture". The simple fact is you are never going to be fast, clean and powerful without it. KDE has managed to make so much progress precisely because of it. In fact they seem to be changing course to a more spartan development model in the name of "streamlined usability". They acknowledge that they have lost their edge and then they seem to go out and do the exact opposite of what you would think the lesson to learn is...
Users of a product follow their more technically inclined friends. Those people are called in the marketing world "early adoptors" and they want power and configurability because they want to get the most out of their software or they like to play with it. Where are these types of people going to go now? Spending effort to produce product without first focusing on infrastrcture is what marketing departments like M$ do to produce inconsistent and buggy software. I'm not saying that Gnome will do that... I'm saying play the odds. On top of everything else they are coming to their developers telling them they need to work harder to produce what they make and here is how to tell your user he can't have what he wants. My question is, knowing open source development, where is the fun in that?
I've long advocated for two strong desktops to give people a choice. I thought Gnome 2 and 2.2 were going to be addressing a lot of this stuff that Miguel seems to be saying they don't have time for. Is it mostly delivering things we had over a year ago like AA fonts? I don't think it's really a matter of which desktop is better. I think it's more a matter of them needing to somehow learn the right lessons before they are so far behind there isn't another viable desktop besides KDE. Perhaps it is a matter of not admitting somebody else is right even if it means jumping from one lifeboat to another.
Frankly it's just sad. They've gone through three desktops in two major releases and seem to be changing various other aspects of their architecture before they can bear fruit and now Miguel seems to be advocating slapping something on top and worring about the structure later. There's no point in debating. This looks pretty bad to me.
Be kind when developers and users come to you... |
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