Thought of the day
January 11, 2007 1:37 pm gnomeGNOME is not a project which is independent of commercial interests, as much as we fancy ourselves as that.
On the contrary, commercial interests are all around us – several modules change maintainership when the maintainer leaves a company, and most of the committers on many modules come from one or two companies.
The question, then, is not how we go about integrating commercial interests into the project, but how we mould the commercial interests already in the community so that they are community-friendly. The best way to do this is to first recognise the existing commercial forces, and to evolve the project so that GNOME can become a true center of collaboration and communication.
January 12th, 2007 at 3:15 am
Please bear with us and keep this corporate talking for you.
January 12th, 2007 at 4:06 am
As much as I’d like to respond to this fine comment, I don’t talk to people who post anonymous comments on blogs. Who are you?
January 13th, 2007 at 1:17 am
Hey Dave,
As one of the active and programming members of the GNOME community you are talking about, I disagree with this anonymous person (he also has no right to dictate what you should blog about) and agree with your point of view.
January 13th, 2007 at 9:40 am
GNOME is not a project which is independent of commercial interests, as much as we fancy ourselves as that.
Maybe I’m just old and cynical, but I don’t think most of us fancy ourselves that. We’ve been heavily commercial for a long time- frankly, 2.0 would not have been released without Sun and Ximian; we know that gtk is driven primarily by investment from RH; a11y driven primarily by investment from Sun; evolution primarily by Novell/Ximian… all of these things have been true for at least five years. Obviously it isn’t perfect (and I think you’re completely right that we should be more proactive in molding ‘our’ companies), but generally we’ve always viewed that commercial interest as a sign of success.