Well, I've tried GNOME 3 now...

[Bill Nottingham]

(drifting waaaaay off-topic for test@, at this point...)

Gregory Maxwell (gmaxwell at gmail.com) said: 
> On Mon, Apr 25, 2011 at 5:23 PM, Bill Nottingham <notting at redhat.com> wrote:
> > http://git.gnome.org/
> > http://spins.fedoraproject.org/
> >
> > The beautiful thing about open source is that you always have that choice.
> > Sure, you may not like the amount of effort that may be involved (on a
> > scale that goes from switching your local desktop, all the way up to forking
> > your own copy of GNOME 2.30 and taking it in whatever direction you feel
> > like), but it doesn't mean you don't have that choice.
> 
> Even if there were no "open source" you'd have the _choice_ of creating your
> own operating system and software all from scratch if the available software
> didn't work the way you needed it to.  But because of the enormous effort
> required that "freedom" isn't very meaningful.

It was stated that GNOME upstream, to use the Ford analogy, have eliminated
the panel/menu/desktop-icon desktop metaphor from existence in Fedora 'by
fiat'. I find that a pretty silly argument given the choices that are
available.

However, it's these sort of reactions that drive me up the wall. Carping
about "not being given a choice"? Complaining to "give me XXX back"? Saying
"it been honestly [described] everyone interested in GNOME could have known
their favorite desktop project's maintainers had abandoned them over a year 
ago and made the decision to either step up and maintain it or put the
effort into picking a new one"? (Ignoring the part where GNOME Shell
has been developed entirely in the open for the better part of 2-3 years..)

The entire point of creating a participatory culture is that *you have
agency in your decisions*.  Anyone using OSX, or iOS, or hell, even Android
in a lot of cases, can vent on a mailing list, or post to their blog about
how all the horrible changes The Man is doing to their software is ruining
it. But with F/OSS, Fedora, GNOME, *you* have some ability to direct what
happens. Now, is a voice in the wilderness who is othewise dissociated from
anything happening upstream going to dissuade people? Not likely. Is a
general consensus? Maybe. Is a huge swath of the userbase voting with their
feet, or forking the project? Likely. But, really... talk is just that.
Talk.

And, truly, it is work to take over maintenance of something when upstream
goes a different way. But it *does* happen in open source.

Mozilla discontinued the all-in-one application suite. Enough people got a
critical mass that there's now the SeaMonkey project -
http://seamonkey-project.org/

Oracle was becoming less and less attuned to the OpenOffice.org community
of users and developers. Thus begat... LibreOffice.

KDE switched to KDE 4, changing many things in the process. Some people were
disgruntled enough to maintain a fork of that - http://www.trinitydesktop.org/

If, truly, 'everyone interested in GNOME' has been abandoned, surely some
level of critical mass could be attained? Or could be redirected to make
some other desktop better in the way these people want?

> That sort of argument  should be rebutted with evidence that on the whole
> and in the long term the change is expected  to be beneficial to the user
> community and/or the GNU/Linux  ecosystem overall and evidence that these
> goals could not otherwise be met through means which deprived (by forcing
> them into non-standard configurations) fewer users of the value that
> Fedora provides.

Well, there's the unstated link from "I don't like it" to "net-detrimental
to the Fedora user community" above. Which is an argument that also needs
evidence. (Some has been posted. A lot of complaints don't have much in the
way of evidence.) Aside from that...

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mission

...
The Fedora Project's mission is to lead the advancement of free and open
source software and content as a collaborative community.

The three elements of this mission are clear:

    The Fedora Project always strives to lead, not follow.
    The Fedora Project consistently seeks to create, improve, and spread
    free/libre code and content. 
...

>From there, it's not a huge logical step that one of the best ways to
accomplish that goals is to spread the Fedora OS to a wider audience.

Now, let's take some random stats:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/99/Wikimedia_traffic_by_linux_os.svg

Or, to view the same data in a different way:

ENTITY 	Feb 11 	Apr 09 	Change
Fedora 	2350 	3257 	-27.85% 

Similarly, if you view https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Stats, and similar
pages, the trend is relatively flat, or downward, ever since Fedora Core 6.
(There's a slight peak around F11 or F12, but even so, it's not a drastic
jump).

If your goal is to spread the OS to a wider audience, it's a pretty fair
statement that 'business as usual' does not appear to be working, or
at least working in an obvious fashion.

So, if we take the examples where traffic is increasing in the above
wikimedia graphic:

Ubuntu:
- Desktop focus
- Usability focus
- Design driven

Android:
- Mobile focus
- Different interface paradigm compared to traditional desktop

Ergo, a reasonable direction is "a newly designed interface, focusing on
usability, with changes to some paradigms". Of course, there's room for
argument here, both as to the direction, and the decisions made during that
design. But I think it's a fairly straightforward bit of reasoning to get
from the Fedora Project principles and the current state of Linux computing
to where we are now.

Bill