GNOME, XFCE and the GNOME development platform

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

I'm probably a little biased since I've been playing around with
building a "built on top of the GNOME libraries but not GNOME"
environment...but...

Aside from the corporate issues (e.g. I can see mechanisms by which
XFCE's success could be construed as hurting Ximian) and power issues I
don't see why we would view XFCE as a competitor. Maybe I'm not enough
of a politician, but from a technical standpoint I sort of see GNOME as
a somewhat arbitrary collection of components that we ship together. I
mean, obviously there's some integration and stuff, but we basically
take existing applications and decide to make them a part of the desktop
(like we might do and make Galeon the defacto GNOME web browser, for
example).

The only thing that really makes GNOME "GNOME", imo, is the development
platform. The idea is that when something decides to be a GNOME
application the developer knows they have a standard set of libraries
they can depend on being present. This is GNOME , a set of libraries for
people to develop with. Now clearly there's an interface and environment
too, but this is like an interpretation of GNOME...like the performance
of a music piece. I see XFCE in that light, its a different take on the
same piece.