(drifting waaaaay off-topic for test@, at this point...) Gregory Maxwell (gmaxwell@xxxxxxxxx) said: > On Mon, Apr 25, 2011 at 5:23 PM, Bill Nottingham <notting@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > http://git.gnome.org/ > > http://spins.fedoraproject.org/ > > > > The beautiful thing about open source is that you always have that choice. > > Sure, you may not like the amount of effort that may be involved (on a > > scale that goes from switching your local desktop, all the way up to forking > > your own copy of GNOME 2.30 and taking it in whatever direction you feel > > like), but it doesn't mean you don't have that choice. > > Even if there were no "open source" you'd have the _choice_ of creating your > own operating system and software all from scratch if the available software > didn't work the way you needed it to. But because of the enormous effort > required that "freedom" isn't very meaningful. It was stated that GNOME upstream, to use the Ford analogy, have eliminated the panel/menu/desktop-icon desktop metaphor from existence in Fedora 'by fiat'. I find that a pretty silly argument given the choices that are available. However, it's these sort of reactions that drive me up the wall. Carping about "not being given a choice"? Complaining to "give me XXX back"? Saying "it been honestly [described] everyone interested in GNOME could have known their favorite desktop project's maintainers had abandoned them over a year ago and made the decision to either step up and maintain it or put the effort into picking a new one"? (Ignoring the part where GNOME Shell has been developed entirely in the open for the better part of 2-3 years..) The entire point of creating a participatory culture is that *you have agency in your decisions*. Anyone using OSX, or iOS, or hell, even Android in a lot of cases, can vent on a mailing list, or post to their blog about how all the horrible changes The Man is doing to their software is ruining it. But with F/OSS, Fedora, GNOME, *you* have some ability to direct what happens. Now, is a voice in the wilderness who is othewise dissociated from anything happening upstream going to dissuade people? Not likely. Is a general consensus? Maybe. Is a huge swath of the userbase voting with their feet, or forking the project? Likely. But, really... talk is just that. Talk. And, truly, it is work to take over maintenance of something when upstream goes a different way. But it *does* happen in open source. Mozilla discontinued the all-in-one application suite. Enough people got a critical mass that there's now the SeaMonkey project - http://seamonkey-project.org/ Oracle was becoming less and less attuned to the OpenOffice.org community of users and developers. Thus begat... LibreOffice. KDE switched to KDE 4, changing many things in the process. Some people were disgruntled enough to maintain a fork of that - http://www.trinitydesktop.org/ If, truly, 'everyone interested in GNOME' has been abandoned, surely some level of critical mass could be attained? Or could be redirected to make some other desktop better in the way these people want? > That sort of argument should be rebutted with evidence that on the whole > and in the long term the change is expected to be beneficial to the user > community and/or the GNU/Linux ecosystem overall and evidence that these > goals could not otherwise be met through means which deprived (by forcing > them into non-standard configurations) fewer users of the value that > Fedora provides. Well, there's the unstated link from "I don't like it" to "net-detrimental to the Fedora user community" above. Which is an argument that also needs evidence. (Some has been posted. A lot of complaints don't have much in the way of evidence.) Aside from that... http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mission ... The Fedora Project's mission is to lead the advancement of free and open source software and content as a collaborative community. The three elements of this mission are clear: The Fedora Project always strives to lead, not follow. The Fedora Project consistently seeks to create, improve, and spread free/libre code and content. ... >From there, it's not a huge logical step that one of the best ways to accomplish that goals is to spread the Fedora OS to a wider audience. Now, let's take some random stats: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/99/Wikimedia_traffic_by_linux_os.svg Or, to view the same data in a different way: ENTITY Feb 11 Apr 09 Change Fedora 2350 3257 -27.85% Similarly, if you view https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Stats, and similar pages, the trend is relatively flat, or downward, ever since Fedora Core 6. (There's a slight peak around F11 or F12, but even so, it's not a drastic jump). If your goal is to spread the OS to a wider audience, it's a pretty fair statement that 'business as usual' does not appear to be working, or at least working in an obvious fashion. So, if we take the examples where traffic is increasing in the above wikimedia graphic: Ubuntu: - Desktop focus - Usability focus - Design driven Android: - Mobile focus - Different interface paradigm compared to traditional desktop Ergo, a reasonable direction is "a newly designed interface, focusing on usability, with changes to some paradigms". Of course, there's room for argument here, both as to the direction, and the decisions made during that design. But I think it's a fairly straightforward bit of reasoning to get from the Fedora Project principles and the current state of Linux computing to where we are now. Bill -- test mailing list test@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/test
