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

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs eazel com>]

mawarkus t-online de (Matthias Warkus) writes:

> 
> 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.
> 

Matthias,

As other people have mentioned, I think this is because of a conscious
decision to concentrate on the missing parts of the user platform for
1.4, and then focus again on the development platform for 2.0. It is
true that people tend to spend more time inside their compan'us


> 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.

I have to object to this part. Nautilus is a community project - we
have at last count 99 contributors credited in THANKS and AUTHORS,
more than the total number of people employed by Eazel. And the
Nautilus team is also spending a lot of time and effort on projects
that we hope will be used throughout the GNOME project and improve the
whole environment: things like gnome-vfs, oaf, medusa and
xml-i18n-tools. Eazel also has people working on gnome-libs,
gnome-core, sawfish and other stuff, and we hope to step this up over
time.

Further, many technologies that have been intially developed inside
the nautilus module we plan to feed back to core libraries. We have a
lot of enhancements ready to go into gtk, glib, gnome-libs, and so
forth, which we have not yet fed upstream because the 1.x platform is
frozen.

As far as concerns about Nautilus selling a commercial service or
having Eazel Branding: We are actually planning to remove our
corporate logos for the 1.0 release and have some neutral branding for
the gnome.org source release, but provide a package that adds our logo
to binary distributors. And Nautilus builds with Eazel Services
disabled by default, you have to configure with
--enable-eazel-services to get that code. In fact, we are hoping to
move all the services code into a separate `trilobite' module in gnome
cvs for a release shortly after 1.0.

On the other hand, I think what you say has a kernel of truth - that
different people pursuing their services agendas with GNOME can lead
to unhealthy competition and be bad to the platform. To that end, I
have kicked off a discussion that Havoc alluded to at the GNOME
Foundation Board level about how GNOME is being pulled in different
directions this way, and what the GNOME project can do to help. One
suggestion I raised was that modules that have hooks for services be
required to make them generic, and distribute any specific services
back end separately. This has the potential to lead to more
cooperation on core code and less fighting for control of modules,
while at the same time letting companies that want to pay people to
hack GNOME make their living.

So yes, overall we have problems. But I think we are very aware of
them and working on them. While there has been a fair bit of acrimony
in the GNOME world of late, we are better equipped to deal with it and
better organized than ever before. I see various organizing committees
like the GNOME 1.4 release team and the GUADEC committee meeting
regularly and publicly posting their minutes. We have an actual point
by point schedule for the 1.4 release. High level decision making is
done by an elected board that is broadly representative. I think these
are all signs that despite some of the bad stuff, we are heading in
the right direction to address these problems.

 - Maciej