the next step on the desktop

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Monday, January 31, 2011, Steven Sroka wrote:
> Discourage people from using GNOME 3, by making KDE even better (as
> stated above) and continue pushing it as a formidable desktop and not
> by outwardly and publicly criticizing GNOME devs attitudes. You are
> tip-toeing on a fine line. I say this politely :)

yes, it is a fine line. and i don't wish to start flame wars or make the 
situation worse. at the same time, i'm not going to pretend it isn't 
happening. it is happening, it is not good for the users of free software and 
people should be held accountable to their actions.

i'm not planning on any sort of public campaign or anything, but this is a 
situation that many of us, including myself, have quietly tolerated for a 
while now. we've tried, numerous times, communicating with GNOME devs about it 
and we have not made a lot of public noise about it. now, i'm not planning on 
making much public noise about it either, but i don't think we can just hope 
for improvement if there are no consequences.

and yes, i think the most positive thing we can do is to make something great 
that will attract people to KDE software, and we should continue to do exactly 
that.

but if someone asks, i will not shy away from noting the unfortunate current 
state of things.
 
> BTW, why are GNOME devs so uncooperative? I keep hearing they are
> working with KDE...

as is true with any large enough group of people, it isn't an all or nothing 
thing. there are those who do work with others well and are doing some good 
work to that end.

unfortunately, in the last couple of years, the rate of cooperation has 
dropped. this is during the same time span when KDE has been adopting more 
external standards and technologies in the name of increasing consistency and 
interoperability than ever before: the mimetype database, the icon naming 
scheme, dbus, all the *Kit frameworks, PulseAudio and on and on. we've also 
been publishing our new work, such as the status notifiers, so others can be 
both aware of the work and use them. this is in marked contrast to how we used 
to develop 5 or more years ago when we were much more insular. unfortunately, 
as we've opened up more, our main cooperating project has been closing down 
more.

whether it's the git repository for freedesktop.org specs, the new jobs dbus 
system in GNOME3, the new system tray stuff, the changes to the notifications 
spec, calling the gtk+ webkit library "libkwebkit.so", etc. the actions have 
been away from more cooperation and back towards insulatory practices.

i don't pretend to know why this is, but it is certainly a recognizable 
regression from where we all were just a couple years ago. it makes me very 
sad. :(

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks
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