Transforming GNOME Into A Linux-Only Project (link)

[Joe Marcus Clarke]

On 5/18/11 3:26 PM, Michal Varga wrote:
> I'll just leave this here as I'm basically speechless, and it's probably
> not worth commenting anyway.
> 
> But for those who might be interested and don't necessarily keep up with
> the latest 'news', clicky:
> 
> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTQ1Nw

GNOME has been heading down this path since 2.0 was released.  It's been
a slow process, but the decisions that were made around hal, devkit,
etc. are unmistakable signs that GNOME is abandoning the OSS desktop in
favor of a Linux desktop.

Is this a bad idea?  Yes and no.  These days, people expect a desktop to
have a tight OS integration.  They like the ability to have mobility,
hardware awareness, sexy graphics, etc. as part of their desktop
experience.  So a desktop can't be completely OS-agnostic.  However,
what GNOME and fd.o could have been better about is to make truly open,
well-documented standards so that vendors like Solaris and *BSD could
plug in bits to provide OS integration.  Say what you will about hal,
but hal had this.  The udev stuff does not.

To me, GNOME could add OS-level integration and provide clear
delineation as to what is PI and what is PD.  The PD stuff should have
open specifications.  That's the OSS model.  But if the GNOME guys want
to make GNOME into the Linux OS, that's their call.  GNOME 2.x is still
open.  Perhaps the fork efforts being discussed will take off.

Joe

-- 
Joe Marcus Clarke
FreeBSD GNOME Team	::	gnome at FreeBSD.org
FreeNode / #freebsd-gnome
http://www.FreeBSD.org/gnome