Re: no external panels for gnome-control-center [was GNOME Feature Proposal: Backup]

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

On 2011-05-13 at 11:56, Luca Ferretti wrote:
 
> > How about: raison d'être.  What is our mission, what is our reason for
> > existing?  Is it to provide a gummy base for others to adapt, modify,
> > and differentiate?
> > 
> > No.
> 
> Your own vision of open source is totally different from mine. Sorry.

we're talking about Gnome, not about open source in general.

Gnome, as a project, has been providing a mix and match platform for
downstream's perusal for the past 10 years. this is especially true in
the (now, thankfully, dead) mobile effort. it turns out that it wasn't
a good plan: people just took and barely contributed back solutions to
the common problem space. Gnome, as a project, got traction and
resources for the base components of the platform — but it barely got
anything else out of this deal.

one of the definitions of madness is doing the same thing over and over
again, and expect different results. repeating the same strategy ("here
are the components: dost what thou wilt with them; and please contribute
back some patches when you have time to honour the license, sir") and
expect different results would be madness.

a uniform, coherent and cogent vision, where the work happens upstream,
where it belongs, and not downstream *is* a new approach — for us, at
least. it has a painful transition, but it's working pretty fine for now.
at least, it's working better than the previous approach: we got the 3.0
release out of it.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.name
B: http://blogs.gnome.org/ebassi