Re: Some notes on GNOME Shell

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 3:31 AM, Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com> wrote:

the GNOME Shell design and development process, as somebody that looks
at it (slightly) from the outside, and since its inception, has been
nothing *but* open. it's your classic open source meritocratic project,
with two benevolent dictators that ultimately make the calls on
technology and design. there's *nothing* new. they happen to be RedHat
employee just because they started the project; GIO has been written by
a RedHat employee and yet I don't see masses in revolt because the
community didn't have a greater deal of control on it. hell, half our
current platform has been written by RH employees and everyone seems to
be using it, contributing to it and improving it.

I agree, it's open for the most part.  What it suffers from is two things: 1) despite all the links, people either are not reading them or it's not good enough to communicate where gnome-shell is going.  2) stop energy can cut the other way preventing new people from actively joining the project due to no one managing or channeling the enthusiasm.  UI discussions are hard because there are so many of them, and I know it's tough for developers to keep chiming in on these things.  But I myself have a hard time figuring out what the end state is since there is still an unfinished quality to the whole thing and we aren't very far from gnome 3.0 release IMHO.  The bottom line though I think it would be easy for Owen and Jon to have some kind of community manger to manage the discussions and also be able to create energy.

If we are having to have Owen put some messages like these, it just a big downer.

Anybody who goes around and starts throwing conspiracy crap about Red Hat or whatever loses all credibility in the discussion.  I've been seeing this crap for over 10 years, give it a rest.

sri