Re: Time to heat up the new module discussion

[Andrew Cowie <andrew operationaldynamics com>]

On Fri, 2006-07-14 at 14:30 -0400, Dan Winship wrote:
> and not have to pick sides. The downstream distros/users could
> then pick a set of packages that fit together to meet their needs.
> Which, honestly, is what already happens. ...

This is the gist of my comment yesterday that the debate is somewhat
specious. People will ship what they ship; what GNOME's release team
says is "The Desktop" is somewhat secondary.

The miracle of open source is that it provides an opportunity for
collaboration. Take Sun and Red Hat. While they are competitors, a
subset of what they do is common infrastructure and so both benefit by
working together in that overlap [which, as FOSS has shown, can be
surprisingly large].

Coming back to earth now: I'm not a big fan of .Net for the reasons of
legal ambiguity and advancing the interests of a company that actively
is working against us and the freedoms we strive to represent. But on
the other hand, I recognize that many people in our community don't feel
that way, and meanwhile Mono is a platform with a great deal of interest
and attention and vibrancy. So people want to use it to write GNOME
apps? Great! And meanwhile, my work and theirs overlaps in that we both
use core libraries like GTK and all benefit from improvements to it.

Will I use Mono apps? Generally not. But will I, a Java guy, stand on
the soap box and scream at the top of my lungs and do anything I can to
keep them and their awesome applications second class citizens? Sorry,
I've got better things to do.

> Maybe the thing to do is to weaken the sense of the Desktop release.
> Rather than being "this is what we think every GNOME Desktop should
> have",

I think this branch of the conversation about defining a core set of
libraries and critical applications that have to run broadly and very
fast and that everyone can bind a worthy one.

And I'll certainly support efforts to define it - and indeed will
support efforts to keep it lean and mean.

After all, we can all bind C libraries. Binding to applications,
regardless of language, is harder. And it's certainly quite difficult
(though doable) to bind to libraries or applications written the higher
level managed language runtimes. So this would seem to be the obvious
interface boundary.

> it would be "these are programs that we think can be a nutritious
> part of your GNOME Desktop", 

GNOME: A source of 9 essential vitamins!

AfC
London