Posted on by Olav Vitters

Upstream

I think it is interesting to take GNOME and experiment with it. It might result in some really nice new insights. Still, calling such changes ‘upstream’ is completely wrong. That is not what has been done. Just be honest about what you are doing. I don’t think everyone has to work upstream, even if such experiments are not ideal as seen from a upstream/release-team perspective (as in: the more people working on GNOME, the better 🙂 ). I just hope that with this misrepresentation they’re not forgetting the maintenance costs (if you create something new, very likely you’ll have a big share of the maintenance for a long time or in short: no codedumps please). Anyway, let’s see what a different view will bring!

8 Replies to “Upstream”

  1. If you create a piece of software and maintain it then you are the upstream.

    So they are the upstream for various projects no matter how much you try and spin it.

  2. @zekopeko: Please reread my blogpost. It is not ‘spinning’.

    I’m referring to the remark that they’re not changing GNOME and they’re working with upstream. They’re are changing GNOME and they’re not working with GNOME. Calling that working with upstream is ‘spinning’.

    1. No, you said “I think it is interesting to take GNOME and experiment with it. It might result in some really nice new insights. Still, calling such changes ‘upstream’ is completely wrong. That is not what has been done.”

      They are the upstream for those changes until they are accepted in GNOME. I’m not talking here about the odd patch to make standard GNOME work with their design goals but UI built on top of GNOME technology.

      But as you say experimentation is always a good thing. We can already see Shell mockups starting to copy design decisions of Unity.

      1. Oh man how I hate the word “copy”. If decision made of Unity are copied in Shell then Unity is just a copy of shell, c’mon this is free software, it’s all about “copying”.
        Working upstream with GNOME means using its infrastructure (read mailing lists, ftp, irc, etc) and developing everything in the open, design included. Shell and Unity have very very similar goals, while it always cool to have more choices I can’t see why the two project can’t converge in just one at least at this stage of development.
        My impression is that canonical is looking for something unique to have an advantage on its competitors and this is completelly fine. This strategy in the past wasn’t successfull at all for other companies btw.

  3. zekopeko: You’re really reading something different in my words.

    I’m talking about http://derstandard.at/1280984081593/Ubuntu-We-have-no-plans-to-fork-GNOME. No plans to change GNOME, though changes have been made which haven’t been made @ GNOME. If you make changes to GNOME, upstream would be GNOME. Not something else.

    Just be honest and don’t confuse things. Changes have been made to GNOME which aren’t @ GNOME. So it isn’t upstream.

    And development @ GNOME doesn’t happen by such code dumps. It likely will get rejected (code dumps are unworkable basically).

    Still, I like it, etc. But don’t expect such changes to succesfully be submitted to GNOME. For that you have to work in a totally different way. The latter is what I am concerned about. Eventually GNOME might be considered ‘bad’ because we won’t accept such changes, while in practice we have clear reasons for this. Reasons which are IMO pretty well known and accepted.

  4. ovitters,

    Here’s my question. At what point is something _not_ GNOME? At what point does a vendor no longer get to advertise they offer a GNOME experience?

    Mozilla has very specific branding rules about Firefox’s trademarks. If you don’t conform to those rules.. you don’t get to brand it firefox any longer.

    Meego has some trademark rules in place now I believe that serve the same purpose against brand dilution.

    GNOME doesn’t as far as I know. What’s the bright line between GNOME and not-GNOME that vendors who are shipping and using some portion of the GNOME scaffolding are allowed to claim that they ship a GNOME desktop? Obviously a vendor like Litl who is using much of the scaffolding but putting their own UI over the top doesn’t attempt to say its a GNOME environment at all. They’ve made an ethical and strategic decision to not leverage the GNOME branding with their UI even though they share a lot of the underlying pieces.

    But for vendors who swap some pieces out with in-house “experiments” is there a bright-line where its not longer appropriate for that vendor to advertise its interface as GNOME? I’m not sure that GNOME has a project as defined what that line is. And without that bright line, some vendors will find it advantageous to leverage the GNOME brand in positioning their differentiated product as a value-add over a stock GNOME desktop instead of something different causing confusion in the market about what is and what is not GNOME.

    -jef

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