Re: NLD10 and GNOME

[Jamie McCracken <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>]

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)


--
Mr Jamie McCracken
http://www.advogato.org/person/jamiemcc/