Re: NLD10 and GNOME

[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <uraeus linuxrising org>]

Hi, 
While it would be good to get fixes and improvements right away I do
think its to hard to criticize anyone for holding back a bit on things
they are doing. Being able to ship something first is an important
marketing tool and this has happened before. In most cases where it has
happened the distribution makers have been good at working with the
community afterwards to get their changes merged upstream.

Remember getting those changes merged in is in their interest too
as keeping a larger and larger diff maintained is very costly and time
consuming, so I am sure nobody wants to keep the changes any longer than
necessary.

Sincerely,
Christian



On Tue, 2006-02-07 at 14:41 +0000, Jamie McCracken wrote:
> Luis Villa wrote:
> > On 2/7/06, JP Rosevear <jpr novell com> wrote:
> >> On Tue, 2006-02-07 at 10:43 +0000, Jono Bacon wrote:
> >>> Hi all,
> >>>
> >>> Just a quick question to anyone who may be in the know. After seeing
> >>> the NLD10 videos, it seems the GNOME in there is rather similar to the
> >>> mockups shown at http://www.flickr.com/photos/gamehack/sets/1506658/
> >> Indeed, these mockups were made internally at Novell by the UI team
> >> (same guys that brought you betterdesktop).
> >>
> >>> I made a comparison in a blog post at
> >>> http://www.jonobacon.org/viewcomments.php?id=637 to outline the point.
> >>>
> >>> Do we know if these radical changes to GNOME have been implemented,
> >>> and if so, are the changes coming back to the community?
> >> The changes that were implemented were not as radical as the mockups.
> >> Basically what Nat F. showed in Paris is what was implemented.  The code
> >> will be released to the community soon.
> > 
> > To ask the obvious question, why not now, and why not discussed
> > publicly earlier?
> > 
> 
> Ditto + do i take it the changes amount to a fork? (I assume as its 
> internal it does not have maintainer approval nor consensus?)
> 
> To also be so blunt, is this a new strategy by Novell to keep new things 
> like these under wraps in order to steal a march on your competitors? 
> (if so I would be worried by this as it goes against the spirit of open 
> source where "open" is the definitive word - I would hate to see this 
> become common practice as if every gnome based organisation did this we 
> would end up in a mess as well as in the dark)
> 
>