[ale] Ubuntu and the price of Unity

[James Sumners]

On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 12:15 AM, Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 11:49 PM, James Sumners <james.sumners at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> Let me sum that article up simply: the GNOME project doesn't like
>> Canonical's Unity project because it might be more popular than their
>> in-development "Shell" project.
>
> That's not what I read. GNOME is wary because Cannonical  requires/uses a
> copyright/license scheme that signs away copyright to Cannonical and allows
> for closed-source proprietary code. That is very bad from a GNOME
> perspective as they got started because of QT license issues with the
> framework for KDE.


So? GNOME isn't writing software for Cannonical. What Cannonical does
has no bearing on what GNOME does. If Cannonical is violating the
GNOME license(s) (with GNOME code included in their Ubuntu
distribution) then GNOME can take legal action against them.

In regard to my "summary" of the article, look at the last three
paragraphs (the actual summary) of the article. In particular, let's
look a the third to last:

"The troubling possibility for GNOME developers is that the bake-off
is happening outside the big tent of the GNOME project, and if Unity
fulfils its promise and the GNOME Shell fails to pick up users, the
GNOME community may have no choice but to adopt Unity as a default
shell for GNOME."

Why in the world would GNOME care if Ubuntu users like Unity more than
Shell? Why would that force GNOME to adopt Unity over Shell in their
own project? That makes no sense at all. That's like the Enlightenment
project saying "Well, people seem to really like the GTK+ toolkit so
we're going to stop what we're doing and use it for the base of our
DE."


-- 
James Sumners
http://james.roomfullofmirrors.com/

"All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts
pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it
is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become
drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."

Missionaria Protectiva, Text QIV (decto)
CH:D 59