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  • #31
    Originally posted by RahulSundaram View Post
    Objectively speaking, let's assume for a moment that being a dominant contributor for an open source project makes you effectively an owner, that would imply that say, Red Hat also effectively owns the Linux kernel.
    No it wouldn't. RH is a major contributor, no question (though numerically a lot of that comes just from GregKH signing off on so many commits), but even with that caveat it's still well below 20%. That's VERY far from a majority or "dominant" in any way - something that's explicitly called out with that exact wording in the Kernel Development Report, which is about as authoritative as you can get. "No single company dominates kernel development. [...] no company can drive development in directions that hurt the others or restrict what the kernel can do."

    Which is the exact opposite of the situation with GNOME in every regard: theoretically, practically, and provably. Last time I looked, RH was over 50% of GNOME (possibly well over, but I don't have the numbers to hand). That, obviously, IS a majority, and unquestionably dominant, especially when they're the only ones that can merge PRs.

    Originally posted by RahulSundaram View Post
    We would have exclude a whole host of contributions from so many other commercial entities and volunteers to justify that assertion.
    Which, wow, is exactly what happens. GNOME's NIH attitude is *legendary*. Even ignoring the feature side of things, there are acknowledged bugs that third parties have provided patches for that go permanently unmerged for no reason other than vanity and/or the patch coming from "an outsider".

    Given the "we" here, I take it you have a horse in this race, so I understand your desire to defend your tribe. But I don't think this is one of the better points to choose to try that with, even in these post-truth "alternative facts" times. :P

    Originally posted by RahulSundaram View Post
    Also, you have no idea about Red Hat's timelines or their allotted funding for GNOME. They just do not publish that information. So it wouldn't be possible you to accurately claim that they are late or over budget.
    Err, no. If someone publishes a roadmap that say "We'll release A on Date B with Features X, Y, & Z", and then fails to deliver even X until months later than that, Y months later still, and Z not until years after B, anyone can say "Jep, they were late". It doesn't require "secret information" to reach that conclusion. "Outsiders" may not know WHY they failed to deliver, but they absolutely do know THAT they failed to.
    Yes, the budget part is technically an assumption. But you know full well that a project that's years over schedule IS also way over budget, unless the delay was caused by not being able to staff the project, and we know that isn't the case here.

    Thanks for the sane reply though, even if we don't agree on things.

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    • #32
      Originally posted by arQon View Post

      No it wouldn't. RH is a major contributor, no question (though numerically a lot of that comes just from GregKH signing off on so many commits), but even with that caveat it's still well below 20%. That's VERY far from a majority or "dominant" in any way - something that's explicitly called out with that exact wording in the Kernel Development Report, which is about as authoritative as you can get. "No single company dominates kernel development. [...] no company can drive development in directions that hurt the others or restrict what the kernel can do."
      GregKH doesn't sign off on the majority of commits by any means and he doesn't work for Red Hat. Most of the commits are signed off are actually by subsystem maintainers and many if not majority of core maintainers work for Red Hat although they wouldn't necessarily be representing a vendor viewpoint in these signoffs. If you look at the core commits outside of device drivers which obviously are going to be hardware vendors, you will find Red Hat authoring a very dominant majority of the commits and/or Red Hat subsystem maintainers signing off on them. What percentage of commits do you think is authored by Red Hat for GNOME? Feel free to research that and you might be surprised. It is nowhere near the 50% you claim it is. If you are going by the census report in GNOME, GNOME claims the exact same thing as the kernel development report btw. The situation is much more of a parallel than you believe it to be.

      Originally posted by arQon View Post

      Given the "we" here, I take it you have a horse in this race, so I understand your desire to defend your tribe.
      Nope. "We" isn't used in a personal way. I meant all of us and if you are look at the actual commit stats, you will find that many vendors and volunteers are represented. Sounds like you haven't look at that at all.

      Originally posted by arQon View Post

      Err, no. If someone publishes a roadmap that say "We'll release A on Date B with Features X, Y, & Z", and then fails to deliver even X until months later than that, Y months later still, and Z not until years after B, anyone can say "Jep, they were late". It doesn't require "secret information" to reach that conclusion. "Outsiders" may not know WHY they failed to deliver, but they absolutely do know THAT they failed to.
      Yes, the budget part is technically an assumption. But you know full well that a project that's years over schedule IS also way over budget, unless the delay was caused by not being able to staff the project, and we know that isn't the case here.

      Thanks for the sane reply though, even if we don't agree on things.
      GNOME doesn't publish an officially feature roadmap because their release process is time based and not feature based, so both the timeline and budget assumptions are unsupported.
      Last edited by RahulSundaram; 19 November 2020, 09:15 AM.

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      • #33
        My bad: I was looking at a page of kernel stats and somehow misread that GregKH was at RedHat - NO idea how I screwed that part up!

        You say your use of "we" isn't personal: I didn't mean it was for you *individually*, I meant your organisation. Which I had inferred was GNOME based on the context, but in fact is a different part of RedHat. Gotta say, that doesn't exactly do a lot to refute my original comments about the relationship between the two... :P

        I'm greatly amused by your claim that I "might be surprised" if I "did some research", which I already had. I suppose it's technically possible that I "might", but it seems unlikely since YOUR OWN PAGE supports my original comments. But hey, maybe you just forgot.

        * Red Hat is the leading contributor to GNOME Desktop
        * GNOME Shell - Primary development by Owen Taylor and many Red Hat developers and interaction designers
        * glib, gtk+: most primary maintainers
        plus most of the core GNOME applets. And hosting the project, etc.

        I think I'll bow out of this thread here rather than confuse us both any further...

        Sidenote: this isn't about how good or bad RedHat is, which it seems to have been twisted into. But pretending that they don't own GNOME lock, stock, and barrel is either incredibly naive or outright dishonest.
        Last edited by arQon; 20 November 2020, 05:38 AM.

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        • #34
          144Hz- There's a big difference between "a handful of apps/applets ARE community-maintained" and "GNOME as a whole is".

          This has semi-split into two topics really, so I'll try to deal with each in turn, but there's going to be some overlap.

          RH employees can (and do) unilaterally add, remove, and block features, UI aspects, and otherwise exercise total control over every piece of GNOME that matters. This is well documented in hundreds of bug reports, commits, public notes, and so on. I don't think you're really trying to claim that's not the case. And you may like that: after all, it's more efficient that way, and you like the end result, so you don't see a problem with that.
          And I get it. Once we've aligned ourselves with something, accepting any reality for it that doesn't match the ideal in our head feels like betrayal, or even heresy, and we shy away from it because it makes us uncomfortable.

          But there's a bigger picture, and GNOME no longer even PRETENDS to support cooperation with anyone. The freedesktop.org "standards", which GNOME used to use as an attempt to legitimise their way as the only way back in the original GNOME vs KDE "wars", now get abandoned by GNOME the second it's inconvenient for them. And, true, to be clear, FDO has never been about *binding* standards - but the original claims GNOME made back at the time are still valid now, in that it's in the USERS' best interests if we do have interop between the different desktops. Now that GNOME has a comfortable majority in the desktop space though, they no longer see any value to that position.

          Two of the more notable examples are how after Canonical added support for desktop icons in Unity, GNOME removed the code that made that possible from the underlying toolkit. The appindicator fiasco was another case of "outsiders" trying to work with GNOME and getting nowhere. (There's a lot of "he said, she said" to that one though, so I don't expect any GNOME devotees to acknowledge any fault on GNOME's part).

          Those are efforts from the company that did more for desktop adoption than anyone else, but even they can't get anywhere with GNOME. Not because GNOME is owned by RH and is *deliberately* sabotaging Canonical - I'm not suggesting that at all - but simply because GNOME is what it is, and has been for a very long time now: a group that *in general* believes its members to be the Chosen Few, free to ignore outsiders not only on design choices, but also bugs, and even fixes for those bugs, solely because that input is FROM outsiders. "One should not expect Gnome to embrace ideas which were not generated and hosted purely within Gnome".
          The fact that many of those Chosen Few - and especially, those with controlling authority for both the UI and the core code - are RH employees means that RH doesn't have the same problems that everyone else does. Look at how integrated GNOME and systemd are these days, as a trivial example of how it's possible for RH to drive changes into GNOME in a way that no other user or corp could ever get even a trace of accepted. (And I suppose I need to point out that I'm not making a value judgement there, just to prevent this degenerating into yet another systemd flamewar).

          The reason this sort of thing matters is that we DON'T have a single desktop, for all that GNOME and KDE fanboys both seem to believe that their cause will magically take over the world next week. So when you have to run a Qt app on a GTK desktop, there's a very good chance that even something as simple as the menu bar will use the wrong font and size and colors, and the systray won't work, and so on. And since the KDE team DOES actually put some effort into interop, the opposite case is even worse.
          Which utterly sucks for users, and could all be avoided if there was even the TINIEST hint of actual cooperation between the various teams. But one of the players doesn't WANT cooperation, unless it's of direct benefit to them personally, not their users - and they seem to believe they can manage with that approach because they WILL become the One True Desktop at some point.

          This isn't a new trend: it's been going on for over a decade now, and it's not getting any better. I think that part of the problem is that because GNOME controls both their own DE *and* the underlying GTK, they're in a position to exert an abnormal amount of influence over anyone ELSE trying to make a GTK-based DE. And rather than seeing a Unity or a Cinnamon or etc as variations that support the GNOME ecosystem as a whole, they see them as competitors, on par with or possibly even more "the enemy" than KDE. After all, if yours is the One True Desktop, *everybody* else is "wrong", no matter how much you have in common. The People's Front of Judea, etc.

          Anyway, I don't have any more energy for this topic: this post has ended up far far longer than I intended or wanted. I certainly don't expect to convince any True Believers that RH/GNOME/whatever isn't always right in everything they do, or that their pretense that RH doesn't control GNOME isn't real, which is why my previous post in this thread was meant to be the last.
          Like I said in my very first post, I wish GNOME well. I just don't want them in a position to keep breaking my desktop when I'm not even running their DE, which is a wish I'll see fulfilled soon enough.

          Feel free to make another one-line post defending your tribe though, with your usual petty insults thrown in. I'm way past done with this topic.

          Comment


          • #35
            Originally posted by Mez' View Post
            Gnome is a dictatorship
            Ah yes, the classic "They don't do what I want them to do".

            Originally posted by Mez' View Post
            and the devs enforce their bunker ideas and developer (or keyboard)-centric UI
            You are right, this isn't made for grandma. This is made by hackers as a tool to make their life easier and we are all welcome to hack around with it ourselfs, thats why it is nearly fully script controlled and live patchable. They aren't here to make a as simple as possible desktop because there are enough of them and they suck for everyone beside grandma.

            Originally posted by Mez' View Post
            to users that are asking for something else (as the extensions system show).
            Do you want little applets or do you want the power to change everything about the desktop? I rather want the powerful solution that may not be easy and comes with a price to pay.


            What you lack is a bit of respect towards the people who spend their damn free time to build the desktop they want because all you seem to be able to is blaming them to not listen to your BS. Contribute some code if you want something, beside that all you can do is to ask friendly. Entitled User.

            Comment


            • #36
              Originally posted by Alexmitter View Post
              Ah yes, the classic "They don't do what I want them to do".


              You are right, this isn't made for grandma. This is made by hackers as a tool to make their life easier and we are all welcome to hack around with it ourselfs, thats why it is nearly fully script controlled and live patchable. They aren't here to make a as simple as possible desktop because there are enough of them and they suck for everyone beside grandma.


              Do you want little applets or do you want the power to change everything about the desktop? I rather want the powerful solution that may not be easy and comes with a price to pay.


              What you lack is a bit of respect towards the people who spend their damn free time to build the desktop they want because all you seem to be able to is blaming them to not listen to your BS. Contribute some code if you want something, beside that all you can do is to ask friendly. Entitled User.
              Cut your yes-man bullcrap. This has nothing to do with free time. Gnome 3 was designed mostly by Red Hat employees. Paid on their work time.

              It's not powerful at all since it has been stripping down features with every release. It's the extension system that makes up for its shortcomings. Meaning third-party developers actually using their free time to do what designers and main paid devs weren't able to.
              Gnome devs never had any user interest in mind (I don't care about mine, I care about everyone's). They don't respect the diversity of use cases and workflows. Why should I respect them when they don't respect their user base?

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