I don’t get it. There’s a huge bunch of people, users and contributors, throwing mud at each other in the name of their favorite Free Software project. Online on blogs, identi.ca, forums, mailing lists and virtually any form of communication known to the broader Free Software community. Most blog posts have no actual content, but are just slurs and hatred wrapped in nice rhetoric. Both sides seem to largely have lost the ability or will to talk to each other. What I’m observing is the GNOME/Canonical debate.
On the GNOME side, people accuse Canonical of not working together with the GNOME project. Most of the controversy seems to evolve around the decision to use the desktop that started as an in-house Canonical project called Unity instead of the new GNOME Shell in the upcoming release of Ubuntu. Supporters of GNOME seem to see that as an open attack on their project, or something like that. Much of the argument is also fueled by past and present Canonical “mistakes” like moving the window buttons, their policy of copyright assignment and most recently the change of the Banshee Amazon affiliate ID.
On the Canonical side, it seems people are sick and tired of receiving a ton of hate mail for every little change they make. I could imagine that having to justify that they’re working on a Free Software project and giving it away for free can be quite frustrating for Canonical employees and Ubuntu community members. After all everything they do (at least on the desktop) is completely Free Software.
Now, when I see both sides putting so much effort into the discussion, I am asking myself:
What do they try to achieve?
The thing is, that’s not that easy to answer. Of course everyone speaking/writing on this subject may try to achieve something else, but the general tone I seem to hear is:
GNOME: Use GNOME Shell in your next release and abandon your non-upstream stuff like Unity, Application Indicators, Messaging Menu etc or at least integrate it into GNOME Shell.
Canonical: We would really like to keep using that stuff, leave us alone already.
Let’s broaden the perspective a bit. Let’s move away from the current discussion and look at what the projects, GNOME and Ubuntu, try to achieve. Because I think they have a common goal, and actually a very similar vision of how that goal should look like. A Free Software desktop, easy to use, elegant, with a unified user experience and a unified developer experience. In short, a Free Software desktop operating system and platform that is able to compete with the proprietary alternatives. This also includes an App Store/Software Center. Let me show you two screenshots.
Does this look like a different vision to you? Does this look so different to you that it’s worth having a heated argument about it? To me it seems that GNOME and Ubuntu still share the same vision, and also have very similar understandings of the concrete manifestation of a Free Software desktop. This is what the Ubuntu community means when they say they are still a GNOME distro. Canonical tweaked the desktop over several releases with the introduction of App Indicators, the MeMenu etc etc and presented Unity as an end result of this, while the GNOME people got their Shell ready and ported most of the core applications to GTK3.
Now the final release of Unity for standard desktops and the final release of GNOME 3 (which will first be included in a major distro in Fedora 15) are soon to happen. It’s not a new phenomena in Free Software communities that when two projects are equally good and it doesn’t look like one is going to cease development anytime soon (it is my point of view that Unity and GNOME Shell are currently equally good desktops, I’m trying to be as objective as possible here), a huge flame war starts. These are almost never based on “technical” arguments, only sometimes based on project politics, and all of the times pure personal preference. The latter also applies in this case. You might argue about Canonical’s decision finding process, or the way they develop software, but they release working software that obviously pleases its users. This is Free Software. Even if you don’t like the company developing it, in the end only the code matters, and whether the users like it. The freedom is not going away.
What I’m trying to say is: Are the points brought up against Canonical really that grave? Grave enough to justify a major split of the Free Software Desktop? Can’t two projects with such similar goals, such similar visions and such a shared history as GNOME and Ubuntu stop the turf war and try to get things done together? And if that’s not possible for reasons I fail to see right now, at least accept and respect the existence of each other? If Google launches Chrome OS soon, I’m sure they’ll put all their force behind it, and I don’t think there will be enough space left for a fourth major player on the desktop market after that. This might be the last chance for the Free Software Desktop. Can we unite, or will we go down fighting each other?




