Kamp: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar [LWN.net]

Kamp: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

Posted Aug 20, 2012 17:18 UTC (Mon) by landley (guest, #6789)
In reply to: Kamp: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar by drag
Parent article: Kamp: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

Gnome didn't make just _one_ mistake. But in this context, it couldn't figure out if it was steered by committee or by fiat, so it seesawed back and forth a few times, which didn't go over well.

The standard way to move from "committee" to "fiat" is by forking, an example would be Galeon (and later Firefox) forking off of Mozilla. Or you can start over and be simple but reuse some parts, ala XFCE (done by Olivier Fourdan).

But Gnome started life as a reaction to KDE (a protest over licensing issues), which meant early on KDE got all of the pragmatists and Gnome got all the idealists. There's way more wrong with Gnome than just this one organizational issue. :)

Rob

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Kamp: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

Posted Aug 20, 2012 17:28 UTC (Mon) by danieldk (guest, #27876) [Link]

> meant early on KDE got all of the pragmatists and Gnome got all the idealists

Yeah, well, except that big elephant in the room, that likes to wear a colored hat.

Kamp: A Generation Lost in the Bazaar

Posted Aug 20, 2012 17:29 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

> Gnome didn't make just _one_ mistake.

Nobody in this thread mentioned any mistakes. At least not yet.

I am merely pointing out that making arbitrary decisions about what is good for your own software project isn't too popular among some Linux circles.

> The standard way to move from "committee" to "fiat" is by forking, an example would be Galeon (and later Firefox) forking off of Mozilla.

Neither of these are really examples of forks. Galeon started off as it's own web browser that used the Mozilla engine and Firefox is Mozilla's own project which they split off the non-browsing bits into separate applications and put a better UI on top of it.

Galeon essentially died, replaced by Epiphany (at least in spirit..) which now uses webkit and has been largely gone unappreciated because Chrome kicks so much ass.