Friday, April 22 2005 @ 02:26 AM EDT Contributed by: glosser
A GNOME developer gives his reasons for requesting a fork at version 3 of the project.
My take on the GNOME 3 discussion is that we have multiple goals at the moment which are truly in conflict. On the one hand, we have the fairly traditional desktop of today, with some growing userbase, and it's important not to break it. Most of the employed-to-work-on-GNOME developers are focused on this. On the other hand, innovation is necessary to move forward, and there's a lot we could do. But we don't want to drag today's users through broken intermediate states and make them wait 3 years for bugfixes to come out.
Look at how much screaming we get for relatively tiny changes to today's desktop such as the file selector, focus stealing prevention, or whatever. Even with these small things, until the details are ironed out (adding typeahead to the file selector, adding flashing taskbar buttons to the focus stealing prevention) it's pretty disruptive.
There's also a reality that the GNOME 2 desktop, as shipped by most everyone, is the GNOME environment plus Firefox plus OpenOffice.org plus Evolution or Thunderbird; which means that to take a particular UI direction or add a platform feature, you have to convince all of those projects to change... and they are incented to keep the platform as similar to Windows in basic structure as possible. The value of platform features is to create commonality between apps, so if apps don't use the platform, platform features are useless.
