KDE vs. GNOME on F10

[Matej Cepl]

Adam Williamson, Wed, 05 Aug 2009 14:26:53 -0700:
> Well, I think it's really the same issue. The problem is one of
> expectation: we have two similar components, GNOME and KDE, in the same
> distribution, following different update polices - GNOME favours stable,
> KDE favours adventurous. This confounds expectation.
> 
> Yes, my problem is potentially almost solved with the tools at our
> disposal and some little tweaks to interfaces, except for the problem
> raised by Jesse, see my reply to his post. :)

Adam, I see where you are coming from, but aside from the unclear 
definition of the Fedora's target audience (which is IMHO clearly defined 
as developers needing bleeding-edge distro with huge engineering support; 
we just live in denial for not saying so clearly) you are getting into 
much deeper organizational problem ... how manages Fedora. Actually, it 
seems to me the answer is no-one really ... this is really a community of 
packagers held together by very rough consensus and necessity to support 
each other.

As such there is no such thing as "corporate brand" and "expected 
behavior" ... if KDE folks decide they want to package their packages 
(and they are their packages, not of the folks in the RH Desktop team) as 
they do and have multiple upgrades even for N-1 distros, it is only their 
business -- they will have to hold all pieces together if it blows up in 
their face. If Gnome folks decide to be more conservative (or conserving 
effort for Gnome 3.* and bigger stability of Gnome before Fedora 12 aka 
RHEL 6 Alpha) it is their business and nobody could them anything.

I am not sure about Mandriva, I have never had it installed ever (even 
though I got kindly LiveUSB disk at Guadec 2007 -- it was wonderful free 
3GB USB drive before I lost it ;-)), but if it is smaller distro, it 
could be true it was smaller community with more centrally controlled 
strategy?

Or in other words ... read “Nature of the firm” (Coase, 1937) and “The 
Problem of Social Cost” (Coase, 1960) ... to understand one way how to 
get grasp of this community. In the situation where opportunity cost of 
cooperation is quite low, transaction cost is perceived as quite high, 
and cost of leaving the community quite low, there is no way how to 
centralize management of the community. There are some communities where 
it is possible to achieve *slightly* higher degree of centralization 
(Ubuntu, and possibly Mandriva), but certainly it is not the case of 
Fedora which is probably quite close to the extreme of market-driven 
organization (to use Coase's terminology).

Matěj