GNOME and the way forward

GNOME and the way forward

Posted Aug 18, 2005 20:15 UTC (Thu) by piman (subscriber, #8957)
In reply to: GNOME and the way forward by dskoll
Parent article: GNOME and the way forward

> No, it merely saddens me to see that the ubiquity of Microsoft has forced even free-software UI developers to bend over backwards to accomodate Microsoft's stale and irritating UI concepts.

I hear this but I don't believe it; if it was true, I'd find Windows a lot easier to use after using GNOME for the past few years. It definitely borrows more from OS X than Windows, and more from ICCCM/X history than OS X.

> But if they ignore feature requests that are easy to implement (heck, if they ignore patches implementing such features)

100 easy features makes for a complicated program; no patch is without maintenance costs.

> [They're] no better than proprietary vendors who ignore customer requests.

Any software project -- free software or proprietary -- that routinely ignores significant portions of its user group will fail, or a new project to support that group pops up. That's almost tautological, since if the feature doesn't appear, it wasn't that significant in the first place.

> Free Software is about a social contract

The GPL and BSD license, as well as the FSD, OSD, and DFSG, make no promises or even expectations that the application will do exactly what you want. In fact the disclaimer of warranty explicitly says otherwise.

Put your code where your mouth is. Dozens if not hundreds of people continue to do it every day -- which is why software like Window Maker, AfterStep, FVWM, and XFce survive, and projects like GoneME fail.

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