Re: Quo vadis, GNOME? (was: Getting Bugzilla support into Bug-buddy)

[Sri Ramkrishna <sri aracnet com>]

On Tue, 6 Feb 2001, Matthias Warkus wrote:
> Looking at the CVS logs, no one seems to be really working on the core
> anymore. Pretty much all of the code commits go into Nautilus,
> Gnumeric, Evolution and Eazel's and Ximian's supporting and
> surrounding technology and tools.

People are busy with GNOME 1.4 release.  Doing any kind of hacking on the
gnome-core and gnome-libs might do things like change interfaces or binary
compatible or whatnot.  It's not a good idea to change the core technology
that several important projects like Nautilus depend on to be static.
Effectively, you're freezing on the core so that the software can catch
up.

GNOME core technologies are changing drastically.  Consider that GNOME is
moving to a real component technology using Bonobo.  Thats the real core
technology right now.  This is what Miguel and others have been stating
for quite some time.  So it isn't that nobody is working on the core
technology it's happening.

Once GTK+2.0 comes out I think you'll see more work on gnome libs and
getting new features incoporated into the architecture.


> It looks to me as if GNOME is being dismantled by various companies in
> the process of making GNOME generate revenue. None of them really
> intend to destroy GNOME, but the final effect will be the same. Today
> already, the official GNOME packages are considered inferior to
> Ximian's distribution (Ximian GNOME of the forked artwork). GNOME will
> lose its identity as a community project if this goes on.

Big deal.  This is what Red Hat, Codeweaver and others are doing as well.
I suspect that GNOME will soon be another market just like Linux.  You
might  see more distributions.  As long as it's all Free Software there is
nothing wrong with it.  The point is that your moving the world away from
commercial software to free software.

> There should be some guidelines enforced by the GNOME Foundation
> laying down what passes as GNOME. To me, a branded distribution of
> patched GNOME packages with different artwork, containing corporate
> ads and free clients for corporate fee-based services, is *not* GNOME
> anymore.

I suppose, Red Hat's Linux is no longer linux either?  I don't agree with
this at all.

Whats important here is that we advanced Free Software.  We want to get
Free Software out into people's hands.  Companies like Eazel and Xemian
are doing that for us by improving the quality of the artwork, providing
tools to make installation easier, and so forth.  Thus accelerating growth
far faster than what GNOME the volunteer project would have.

Linux today is popular not just because of the kernel.  It's popular
because  companies like Red Hat, Suse, Mandrake, Debian and a host others
are out there improving the installation, ease of use, and the quality support
that customers want.  Eazel and others will do the same for GNOME and in
addition provide valuable code to improve the project.

Thanks,
sri