[In the news] Fedora and GNOME branding drama: Missing the big picture

[Jared K. Smith]

On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 3:10 PM, Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier
<xonker at gmail.com> wrote:
> As I alluded to in a previous post, I suspect this is a reaction to
> what appears to be RHAT making a decision by fiat and people feeling
> upset about that. This may be legitimate, but at the same time, RHAT
> puts in ridiculous amounts of resources into Fedora so maybe it'd be
> equally valid to get over it and do something positive instead of
> people digging in heels over something that is really, deeply trivial.

Let me reiterate a few things here, for the record.

First of all, the decision of the wallpaper for the Gnome desktop in
Fedora 15 was not done by fiat.  It was a request from Gnome
developers (several of which also happen to be Red Hat employees) to
help with the marketing efforts around Gnome 3.  Their original
proposal was to use the Gnome wallpaper for the Fedora 15 release.
Obviously that request met with some resistance, and in the end the
Fedora Design Team and the Gnome developers agreed to a compromise,
which would be a mixture of the Gnome stripes with the Fedora birds
motifs.  While neither side of the argument got exactly what they
wanted, I felt the compromise was better than either of the
alternatives.

To portray this as "Red Hat told Fedora they had to use such-and-such
a wallpaper" is not only incorrect, it's also unfair both to the
Fedora Design Team and the Gnome developers, as it paints both groups
in the worst possible light.  (Why free software/open source
enthusiasts always tend to assume the worst in others is a much
broader topic for another day.)

--
Jared Smith
Fedora Project Leader