Cold, harsh, but reality
November 26, 2007There’s a geek soap opera going on over at Planet GNOME, with the center of attention being Jeff Waugh and his (non?) work for GNOME. Since I really don’t give a rat’s ass about the people behind the software I use (really, I don’t. I care about the product or art, not the programmer or artist), and I only had one run-in with Waugh, I really cannot comment on this stuff. That run-in was perfectly resolved, and he didn’t come across me in a way that resembles whatever Cumming is claiming.
In the end, this is all useless political blabber. GNOME is falling apart. As I have said many times before on this blog as well as on OSNews, GNOME is dead. Dead, dead, dead. If you, as a major software project in a fast-changing world, do not have a well thought-out plan for the future, then you are dead. Cold, harsh, but reality. People have flamed Eugenia and I for saying it, but if a strong leader does not step up soon, a leader that dares to make the hard decisions needed to set a viable plan for the future, than GNOME is doomed to insignificance. It won’t be able to adapt. And we all know what happens to things that do not adapt.
KDE had the guts to make the tough decisions, and despite delays and setbacks, they are slowly but surely seeing the fruit of their labour. I may not like everything coming out of KDE 4, but at least they are trying. And I commend them for it.
I do want KDE 4.0 to be released after December 31st, 2007, though. I want to win my bet with Aaron.
I don’t get it. First, I don’t see what Murray’s personal problem with Jeff has to do with GNOME being dead. But anyway: is Linux dead? That’s a project that has absolutely no defined roadmap at all.
I just don’t understand exactly what GNOME should do as a project to make you happy. And I actually don’t see what KDE’s big plan is. If it’s not too much, do you mind spelling it out for me?
Comment by thebluesgnr — November 27, 2007 @ 5:19 am
>is Linux dead? That’s a project that has absolutely no defined roadmap at all.
Speaking as a desktop OS and not as a kernel, yes, it’s pretty dead. The big days of GNU/Linux was 2000-2003. Since then, the hyped died down and the OS hasn’t won majorly in the OS market share.
>what GNOME should do as a project to make you happy
Innovate. Truly develop and add new things rather than just “maintain” itself.
Comment by Eugenia — November 27, 2007 @ 8:35 pm
Speaking as a desktop OS and not as a kernel, yes, it’s pretty dead.
I was talking about the kernel (I don’t like to use Linux for the whole system and kernel for Linux). The kernel is a project with no roadmap at all, and interesting things happen all the time.
The point is, you don’t need a big plan to be a successul software project. You need to have values and stick to them, you need to keep your code clean and your community healthy. This is the case for both Linux (kernel) and GNOME.
Innovate. Truly develop and add new things rather than just “maintain” itself.
I disagree. Innovation is overrated, specially in IT, where evolution is the rule over revolution. Also, I don’t see anything substantially innovative in KDE 4, so that can’t be what Thom was refering to.
With that said, there are some great innovations in GNOME related projects. For instance, the OLPC is a very innovative device (and yet, I remember you asking for it to use a traditional Windows 95-like interface instead :).
And speaking of GUI projects, I’d like to remind you of Mac OS X. Like GNOME, it has only evolved in incremental updates since version 10.0 (though GNOME has evolved more IMO, mostly because it was a much less mature product at 2.0 than OS X at 10.0).
Comment by thebluesgnr — November 27, 2007 @ 9:11 pm
>I was talking about the kernel
I am not, I don’t care about the kernel. What matters is the user experience, this is what Thom and myself care about. And the Gnu/Linux OS does not have a roadmap. Ubuntu does, but Ubuntu is under-staffed with little interest in actually implementing features rather than just fixing bugs.
>Innovation is overrated,
No, it’s not. There is time for evolution, and there is time for innovation. We get the “maintaining/evolution” path for FIVE years now on Gnome. It is time to innovate. The company that does not need to innovate is MS, because they already own the market. But when you don’t own the market, you HAVE to innovate.
Comment by Eugenia — November 27, 2007 @ 9:22 pm
Haha, yes Mr. Petreley, GNOME is LAME!
When was this, in 2004? GNOME is more thriving than ever.
Oh well, bad press is better than no press anyways …
Comment by Bob — November 27, 2007 @ 9:50 pm
I brought up Linux, the kernel, because it was the first big successful software project other than GNOME that came to mind that has no “big plans” at all for the future, and it’s clearly not dead at all. A perfect counter example that Thom’s claim was wrong.
What you’re doing is completely ignoring the example I gave and using a different one. Fine, but let’s get one thing here: you don’t need a “big plan” to be a healthy software project. That’s what was in discussion here, and I don’t see you proving otherwise.
I used the Linux kernel but there are numerous others I could mention. It’s also interesting that GNOME’s development model is so successful that it started being followed by other big projects like Xorg and some big distributions.
Now, on to the issue of RoadMap: probably unlike the Linux kernel, GNOME does have a roadmap. I even gave you a link to it. Not having a “big plan” to break your entire codebase from working does not mean not having plans for the future. There are quite some interesting things on the radar - I’ll post the link again: http://live.gnome.org/RoadMap.
Now, regarding GNOME and innovation. The OLPC is innovative. The Online Desktop is innovative. By innovative here we are talking about new ways of using a computer. The way to lead this kind of change is exactly the way it’s been happening: with parallel projects. Can you imagine if, instead of creating the “Online Desktop”, Havoc had proposed the same concept to be the actual “GNOME 2.2x” (with bigboard replacing gnome-panel for example)? Imagine the flamewars, imagine all the unhappy users and all the unhappy customers.
If you want a *truly* innovative desktop to be built around GNOME you need the GNOME project to stay healthy. Killing the traditional desktop with a bet for a different kind of interface is not the way to do that, and it’s not necessary at all.
Comment by thebluesgnr — November 28, 2007 @ 12:44 am
“Speaking as a desktop OS and not as a kernel, yes, it’s pretty dead. The big days of GNU/Linux was 2000-2003. Since then, the hyped died down and the OS hasn’t won majorly in the OS market share.”
Spoken like a company drone. If we’d always just looked at Linux (kernel and OSes based on it) from a market share perspective, it should’ve disappeared from the face of this planet a long time ago. But fortunately we’re not doing that, so we have an OS we like and can use, not taking too much time on protesting along the lines of “user experience”’s importance, just using it, for whatever we need, for a long time. The protesting, well, we leave that to those who have nothing else to do.
Innovation in itself, while important in itself, is not everything. Too much innovation can even be bad. During an OSes life I’d palce my bets on evolution being much more important. Doubly so, since evolution can be a loop process which bases changes on feedback, while true innovation is always risky to an extent.
On a sidenote, I’d really like to be able to estimate how many people just use Linux years long, silently, related to those numbers of the people who don’t really use it but complain like their lives would depend on doing it frequently enough.
Comment by l3v1 — November 28, 2007 @ 10:47 am