Quo vadis, GNOME? (was: Getting Bugzilla support into Bug-buddy)

[mawarkus t-online de (Matthias Warkus)]

+++ Tue, Feb 06, 2001 at 07:16:14AM -0500 +++
Alan Cox e-mails me. Film at 11. Reply right now, after the break.
> The other question to go with this is whether a lot of the 'fringe'
> projects that merely happen to be gnome.org projects ought to get
> gently nudged out of the core gnome bugzilla. The reason for saying
> that is that there are not enough people working on gnome
> infrastructure/site admin to keep up with the demands of these
> because most folks are busy working on their rival Ximian or Eazel
> projects and so the number of effective actual gnome core
> contributions has dropped massively rather than risen as might
> originally have been expected.

Looking at the CVS logs, no one seems to be really working on the core
anymore. Pretty much all of the code commits go into Nautilus,
Gnumeric, Evolution and Eazel's and Ximian's supporting and
surrounding technology and tools.

I think we're at the point where we should ask ourselves whether the
GNOME Project can still be considered a living entity at all. And
whether it's a good move to, at this point, tie our next release to
Nautilus, which, however cool, is essentially a third-party product
with the main purpose of generating revenue for Eazel.  If we go on
"outsourcing" software that way, we might end up with a "GNOME
desktop" which is not much more than lots of commercial free software
bundled together haphazardly.

The official GNOME 1.4 should not ask anyone to subscribe to any
commercial service and it should not contain corporate advertisement.
Maybe the problem can be solved by stripping all the Eazel stuff out
of the Nautilus version that'll ship with GNOME 1.4. Eazel could ship
their corporate design and their services as a third-party add-on and
market it from their own site.

Should this happen, it is foreseeable that Eazel, like Ximian, will do
their own distribution of GNOME, especially since Eazel Services and
Red Carpet seem to collide, providing a lot of the same services.

It looks to me as if GNOME is being dismantled by various companies in
the process of making GNOME generate revenue. None of them really
intend to destroy GNOME, but the final effect will be the same. Today
already, the official GNOME packages are considered inferior to
Ximian's distribution (Ximian GNOME of the forked artwork). GNOME will
lose its identity as a community project if this goes on.

There should be some guidelines enforced by the GNOME Foundation
laying down what passes as GNOME. To me, a branded distribution of
patched GNOME packages with different artwork, containing corporate
ads and free clients for corporate fee-based services, is *not* GNOME
anymore. 


Consider this an uninformed opinion if you want. In case it is indeed
just that, it is an uninformed opinion that many other people probably
share.

mawa
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