Developers responsibillity to Fedora Users

[Phil Savoie]

On 09/27/2011 08:58 PM, Kernel Guardian wrote:
> After nearly 25 years of life with Unices, almost 20 years with Linux,
> nowadays I'm pretty confused about future of Linux.
> Allow me to elaborate a bit.
> I'm convinced that the Kernel will survive and be better in the long
> term future. RedHat and IBM as biggest contributors within it and
> Linus as maintainer (leader, mogul ... ) give me faith in the future
> of Linux. GNU fits well on the top of kernel. That is a rock solid
> base for every Linux distribution.
> Last 7 years all of my desktops, laptops, servers are locked down on
> RHEL and derivatives and Fedora. I saw many changes, bad and good
> ones. But last one, with fairly unfinished, not even close to, so
> called Beta release, Gnome 3 DE is the worst what is happened.
> On the other hand, I like the new look, many promising features, ...etc.
> So, what is bad?
> The bad thing is attitude of Gnome (developers, promoters, project
> leaders) toward end users. They decide to abandon Gnome 2 and put
> distribution maintainers in awkward position. Maintainers must use
> (buggy, unfinished, untested) Gnome 3 if they want to use Gnome DE in
> their distribution. Breaking compatibility at API level with previous
> version put application developers in unenviable position. This is
> almost unacceptable! ( because of that I understand Ubuntu leaders )
>>From that point of view I wonder on whose payroll are these gentlemen?
> This is not good way to promote OpenSource way of life, I'm presume.
> I will agree with opinions that DE need some changes, fresh ideas.
> Frankly, I don't see anything new that does not exists in other OS/DE
> combination. It is good to have DE for mobile devices, tablets ....
> etc. But that could be a related project with main Gnome, isn't it? I
> use laptop only when I'm out of office. Desktop with 2 monitors is my
> main workplace. ( someone would say "he is old-fashioned guy" ). No
> one can convince me that all Gnome developers use only laptops. I
> would like to see their workplaces.
> I was shocked when I read the response of one of the Gnome developers
> in a discussion about maximise/minimise buttons. I paraphrase the
> answer: "we where not able to model use cases for them, because each
> user uses them in different ways" ????? (I'd rather not comment this)
> 
> At the end, using of Free Software is liberty/freedom of choice. There
> are many opportunities: KDE, XFCE, LXDE .... They have been created as
> response from people who thought differently. This is a waste of
> energy, time, resources, even money. As an old elephant, I could
> recall the story about end of XFree86 project.
> 
> This is not the way how we can attract more young people who will
> use/make/change OpenSource software.
> Regardless of all these current events about Gnome, I will continue to
> teach my students about importance of OpenSource, FSF, and freedom of
> choice.
> 
> P.S. I like to excuse myself about my English in front of linguistic purists :)

Very, very well said.  Kudos to you!!

Phil