Re: Some notes on GNOME Shell

[Sergey Panov <sipan sipan org>]

On Wed, 2010-06-02 at 20:45 -0700, Sandy Armstrong wrote: 
> On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 4:23 PM, Sergey Panov <sipan sipan org> wrote:
> > I sense a suspicion from the outsiders (not RedHat employees) that
> > project is not just manned by the RedHat employees, but controlled by
> > the company
> 
> It's controlled by the people doing the work, like any other project.
> 
> What does it mean to be "controlled by the company"?  It sounds a bit
> far-fetched.

I was not speaking for myself, I still hope RedHat is an unusual
company. But I can see how people can project their own experiences in
the corporate environment on inner workings of RedHat. In other
companies, the lead engineers are interacting with FOSS communities
directly, but the "dark cardinals"(aka managers) control development
behind the scene. 

> > When design/architecture decisions are made within the
> > company in most of the cases you get, at best, monstrosities like an
> > OpenOffice.
> 
> The differences between gnome-shell's development and that of
> OpenOffice are so staggeringly different that I'm not sure how to
> respond to such a statement.

You did not have to respond - it was not a statement. One of the
candidates proposed a company-agnostic open venue to evaluate/discuss
strategic design/architecture decision. I was trying to explain why it
might be important.

> I really don't see how any of the critical responses in this thread
> are not already answered by Owen's original post.

I am not sure what do you mean by "the critical responses in this
thread" and I do not care much about that particular discussion (I guess
I belong to the minority which views things like Gnome Shell or
Zeitgeist as an icing on a cake, a cake with a serious problems I care
about).


- S.