Re: Having external control panels in System settings

[Sergey Udaltsov <sergey udaltsov gmail com>]

Allan,

> do so; indeed, I beleive that that commitment to collaboration is
> particularly strong in the GNOME project.
Glad to hear. That was definitely the case in GNOME2 days. I am not
sure it is still absolute true with GNOME3. I would be glad to be
wrong.

> too. Just as GNOME has never defined a product, neither have they. I'm
> sure that everyone in this project wants distributions to work with us
> to create something truely competitive.
There are 2 sorts of competition here. Free DE vs proprietary ones
(Win, Mac), and DE distros among themselves. You are talking about the
first sort of competition, right? What about the 2nd one? How can
desktop distros using GNOME actually compete if GNOME is thriving to
define the end product?

> Being Free Software does not mean you can't define a product. Indeed,
> the best thing for Free Software right now is that we do exactly that.
> It's what our proprietary rivals are doing, and they're winning.
Defining the product is essential for winning the end-user,
absolutely! But isn't that a task for the distro? That is what Mark is
doing witn Ubuntu. And GNOME could not help him - GNOME is not helpful
in creating unique custom per-distro experience. GNOME is actively
resisting that - only with heavy patching distros can differentiate.

> with is your suggestion that the decisions that have been made here
> are malicious is some way or that they are against Free Software.
> They're not.
Right, license-wise, they are not. But IMVHO they are against the
spirit of openness. Currently, the architecture is closed - there is
no way to add custom panel. And that was decision explicitly made
without any technical need - just on the total control grounds. I mean
the decision to remove existing public API (it looks even worse than
not creating it).

Sergey