Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

Note that only a witless moron could ever actually be confused (rather than simply annoyed) by "1 files". Unfortunately, we actually deal with these witless morons on a daily basis: they're called computers.

-- Matt Mackall

I think GNOME should really think about what is good for itself, not how to keep the peace. Effectively, KDE has a lot more to gain from a combined conference than GNOME has, the benefits of a joined conference are very unbalanced. I strongly believe GNOME should focus on what is good for GNOME, and much less on what is good for whatever else exists in the Free Software world. Our interest should be GNOME, and making GNOME great, and not at all making KDE great too, and Enlightenment, and whatever else exists.

I'd even go further than this: I believe one of the goals of GNOME should be to emphasize vertical integration (i.e. considering integration of our stack, the GNOME OS a core objective), but encouraging multiple variables on top of this stack makes that much more complex. I think it is against our interest encouraging KDE and other desktop environments.

-- Lennart Poettering

We will not stop telling the world that we were the primary contributors and inventors of OpenOffice.org. The development team in Hamburg created it -- with the help of the OpenOffice.org community -- and is happy to continue developing it. I don't think that this is confusing users. It's the truth. The ASF should use this as a weapon not as a threat. We will also defend ourselves against malicious gossip or suspicion -- same like the ASF does.

-- Götz Wohlberg for Team OpenOffice.org

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Sad attitude

Posted Dec 22, 2011 12:54 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

OpenSource projects do compete. That's the reality.

And that had fragmented Linux desktop quite badly, so there'll never be a 'year of the Linux desktop'. Not that it matters much now.

Sad attitude

Posted Dec 22, 2011 13:44 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

It seems to me, given that GNOME and KDE are both creating software to solve roughly the same set of problems ("provide a usable general-purpose desktop environment"), that the only way for them to not compete is for one of them to stop existing.

Sad attitude

Posted Dec 22, 2011 14:23 UTC (Thu) by sebas (subscriber, #51660) [Link]

Competing on a technical level is fine, I do honestly think it leads to better results in the end.

Competing in the political arena is just annoying, creates artificial barriers, hampers development of both alternatives (and combinations thereof, which is what most actual people are using) and serves no purpose but someone's own mistaken ego.

Sad attitude

Posted Dec 22, 2011 19:13 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Running a conference focused on some specific desktop environment with good technical content and caring more about vertical integration is a technical choice.

Sad attitude

Posted Dec 22, 2011 21:29 UTC (Thu) by jrn (subscriber, #64214) [Link]

Looking at [1], I get the impression that most KDE authors would be happy to find their work used in some useful place within a GNOME or XFCE branded desktop. Which seems sensible --- there are many benefits to building a uniform software stack, but I don't think limiting the chance for experimentation in how to implement each component is one of them.

[1] http://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/softwarecompilatio...

Sad attitude

Posted Dec 28, 2011 17:14 UTC (Wed) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]

Projects should compete based on quality, not based on "vertical integration" or lock-in.

Sad attitude

Posted Dec 22, 2011 20:06 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

If you read through the whole message though what Lennart was complaining about was specifically about the conference schedule and that the topics had become politicized, they felt the need to schedule "equal time" between KDE and GNOME talks regardless of the demand or supply of appropriate talks. I disagree that the conference should be restricted to only GNOME but the talks should be picked based on their quality and usefulness, not some political need for "equality", if that means that there are a bunch of Enlightenment or XFCE talks because that is interesting then so be it, if that means that there is a preponderance of GNOME talks then that is fine too.

Sad attitude

Posted Dec 27, 2011 15:59 UTC (Tue) by steffen780 (guest, #68142) [Link]

Actually, that is only part of what he wrote. He also seems to have a big problem with choice of desktops. He says that he doesn't want to spare a single thought for the other desktops, using the term of "vertical integration" (which is fine, except that he describes "vertical exclusion") - and in the past he attempted to restrict Gnome to Linux. So in short, he wants to force everyone who wants to run free software to use Gnome on Linux. Surely after this posting it should be obvious why so many people have such a strong dislike of his personality. And he should be glad that people like Linus are more enlightened than he is because else his beloved Gnome3 wouldn't even run on Linux, given that Linus doesn't like Gnome3.

He should restrict himself to coding and leave decision-making and communication to people who can see beyond their own desk. All he's achieving with his rants is to offend and allienate people, further splintering the overall effort to produce free desktops and giving the Gnome community a bad name.

Sad attitude

Posted Dec 29, 2011 17:18 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

[FX: looks at the list of installable window managers, GUI widget libraries, and X display managers in Debian.]

Frankly, I don't see how the effort to produce free desktops could get noticeably more splintered than it already is. (I'm also not entirely convinced that GNOME managing to alienate everyone else is of itself a bad thing.)

Sad attitude

Posted Jan 5, 2012 9:31 UTC (Thu) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]

I don't see his post as a rant. He does like to troll (or stirr things up), but not in this message.

I find it curious where the logic is in giving your opinion that he shouldn't give his opinion.

Sad attitude

Posted Jan 6, 2012 0:05 UTC (Fri) by steffen780 (guest, #68142) [Link]

Difference is that I'm not advocating to give up on cooperation - Lennard is. Or at least I don't see how his words could be interpreted any other way, but if I misunderstood him I'm sorry (should've said that in my previous post ofc). If anything there needs to be a lot more cooperation, and not less, to reduce the insane amount of duplication.

As for logic, well, I fully support his right to say what he wants. I also fully support taking some care in what one says, especially when it's on the record and on an extremely touchy subject. I don't see what's illogical about that.