Release coordination - a clarification

[Martin Baulig <martin home-of-linux org>]

Hi guys,

as you might already know, I'm now finally back as GNOME 2.0
release coordinator, and Sander Vesik and me are now starting
to assemble the final GNOME 2.0 release team.

So this stupid and nonsense-less flame-war is now finally over.

However, there are always some idiots on this planet and it looks
to me like Red Hat's marketing department is at least confused
about why I initially decided to step down.

My friend Miguel de Icaza from Ximian told me that they're getting
flamed from Red Hat and Dennis Powel because Red Hat claims that
Ximian forced me to step down as release coordinator.

According to an article from Dennis Powel on LinuxToday
(http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2001-06-19-017-20-NW-GN-KE):

  "And it became a public dispute as dissention among GNOME developers
   over the direction of GNOME 2.0 flared, with the resignation of
   Martin Baulig, the GNOME 2.0 release coordinator, in what apparently
   was a dispute with Ximian, Inc., the surviving GNOME-based corporation."

If the author of this article was just some confused idiot, I probably
would have answered that this is completely insane and not true.

However, the problem is that this statement comes from a marketing person
at Red Hat and a reporter and that Red Hat is now accusing Ximian that
they forced me to step down as release coordinator.

I'm sorry if I annoy anyone with this mail, I'm not accusing anyone and I
really don't want to start another flamewar. But I'm feeling like this issue
needs a clarification from me.

So if this is just a big misunderstanding, let's just forget about this and
don't read on in this mail.

But I cannot just ignore that fact that Red Hat may have been involved in
this issue and if I cannot tolerate such a wrong accusation from someone,
then it's Red Hat.

I'm trying to be very polite in this mail, so just a few facts:

* the last few months, I was working together with Michael Meeks from Ximian
  on GNOME 2.0. Michael was doing all the Bonobo stuff and also working on
  ORBit2 while I was concentrating on libgnome and libgnomeui.

* during this time, I had a lot of technical discussions with him and other
  people at Ximian because Michael Meeks, Dietmar Maurer, Jacob Berkman and
  me were basically the only people who worked on GNOME 2.0.

* I liked my work on GNOME 2.0 a lot and my relationship with Michael and all
  the other people at Ximian was very good, you can even say, we're all good
  friends.

* Two weeks ago, I suddenly got in the middle of a flamewar about bonobo-config
  which was initiated primarily by Havoc Pennington and Owen Taylor - both of
  them working for Red Hat - and both of them haven't done any significant work
  for GNOME 2.0 so far (*)

* A few days ago, Owen posted this article to gnome-2-0-list in which he
  explained that Havoc and he were discussion an alternate component model
  called HUB and both of them already pointed out that they don't believe in
  Bonobo being the future in earlier mails:
  http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-2-0-list/2001-June/msg00309.html

* It annoyed me a lot that two core members of the GNOME team don't believe in
  what I think is the future of GNOME (= Bonobo) and that they're discussion to
  write their own system instead. It also annoyed me a lot that they were
  criticizing my work in libgnome(ui) even if they didn't care at all about it.

* Michael Meeks supported me during this flame-war and he's one of the persons
  who convinced me to reconsider my decision and to continue being release
  coordinator.

So, I'm not accusing Red Hat here, but from reading this, you could easily get
the wrong impression that in fact Red Hat tried to force me to step down.

I have the impression that a few people in the GNOME community don't believe
in GNOME and in its future. Instead, they're trying to push the "platform GTK+"
and thinking about a new component system instead of Bonobo.

It's kinda ironic that two of these people are working for Red Hat and that
they almost succeeded in screwing away one of the GNOME 2 release coordinators.

So you marketing and press folks, start thinking before you write nonsense.

Thanks.

(*) Havoc did the "GConf port of gnome-libs", but his work was a) uncomplete
    (he ported a few files to GConf, but not all of them and there was still
    a lot of stuff left which wan't ported at all) and b) unmaintained (for
    instance, it didn't even compile and large parts of it were commented out
    for months).

-- 
Martin Baulig
martin gnome org (private)
baulig suse de (work)