Re: community managers

[Andreas Nilsson <lists andreasn se>]

On 11/15/2012 09:36 PM, Emily Gonyer wrote:
> I think Dave's point was that we missed an opportunity to keep
> Cinnamon as GNOME 3 - because at one point it was GNOME 3.x with
> extensions piled on. They have since forked and are truly a separate
> project now, but that wasn't always the case. If we had made it clear
> that they & their users were still using GNOME 3, we might have been
> able to bring them into the larger GNOME tent and kept them from
> forking and going their separate way. Just because someone is using
> extensions doesn't mean they aren't using GNOME 3, any more than my
> use of HTTPS Everywhere, AdBlock Plus, etc in Firefox & Chromium make
> them different browsers.
I think the difference there is that you as the person using Firefox in 
the end are the one adding those extensions on top and not someone 
before you in the chain. This is also why I find extensions.gnome.org 
AMAZING, while it worries me about the possible difficulties when you 
try to debug something when a bug report is coming in from someone that 
have a system that works vastly different from what came with your 
system out of the box.
This does not disallow, or even disencourage you or someone else from 
taking, say Firefox, modifying it in various ways or reuse parts of it 
to build something entirely different, like say, a arcade machine or a 
car UI and spread that to the world. I mean, it's free software and all. 
The question is if the name Firefox makes sense for that amazing thing 
you just built, or if it might make things easier for you and everyone 
else installed to give that a new and unique name.

Keeping a good relationship between a project and the people that take 
the project and end up building something quite different with it is 
always desirable when it benefits both parties. Of course.
Cinnamon specifically seems to make some people happy, and I don't mind 
that at all. I think that's great. That's more people using free 
software instead of, say, getting a mac just because they didn't like 
something in GNOME 3.

That's my personal take on Big Tent vs. Tight Core.
- Andreas