Transforming GNOME Into A Linux-Only Project?

[Awesomeness]

It's a bit similar to the KMS situation. And I think we're going to see more of this in the future. The *BSD people simply do not have the resources to keep up. When the time comes that they stand in the way of progress and become a burden, it's time to say goodbye

Well, the code is still open source so they can still port systemd or patch out the dependencies or whatever.

Red Hat is actively sabotaging the BSD since quite some time.
RH is the driving force in technologies like Wayland and RH is also responsible for relicensing Wayland away from a BSD-friendly MIT license to LGPL.

RH could've opted to release such code under MIT license: It's GPL compatible and the BSD teams could copy chunks of the code to make the new features available under the BSDs more easily.

Thanks to this story I was also made aware that hurting BSDs also means hurting Debian – probably RH’s biggest Linux contender.

[liam]

Red Hat is actively sabotaging the BSD since quite some time.
RH is the driving force in technologies like Wayland and RH is also responsible for relicensing Wayland away from a BSD-friendly MIT license to LGPL.

RH could've opted to release such code under MIT license: It's GPL compatible and the BSD teams could copy chunks of the code to make the new features available under the BSDs more easily.

Thanks to this story I was also made aware that hurting BSDs also means hurting Debian – probably RH’s biggest Linux contender.

I can guarantee you that BSD didn't even enter the DEVS (notice the emphasis - RH gives its people a lot more freedom than some here seem to think) minds.
Now what can happen as a result of working together is group-think, but don't confuse that with institutional mandates.
Btw, I think calling Gnome an OS is a bit silly but moving it entirely to a Linux stack would be beneficial for a few reasons: simplify stack(assuming gtk and the rest are onboard), take full advantage of Linux (just as pottering has done with systemd), and provide a more polished DE.

[Wyatt]

Aahhh, GNOME, pursuing irrelevance fervently! Such foolishness deserves a shrine!

[not.sure]

This clown actually works for RH?.

+10 ..char

[snogglethorpe]

Btw, I think calling Gnome an OS is a bit silly but moving it entirely to a Linux stack would be beneficial for a few reasons: simplify stack(assuming gtk and the rest are onboard), take full advantage of Linux (just as pottering has done with systemd), and provide a more polished DE.

It's important to distinguish between "Gnome" and "GTK+". While there may be arguments for making Gnome "linux only" (I'd probably disagree with them -- portability can be a huge pain, but in the end almost always increases technical quality), GTK+ is different: I think it would be a huge mistake to make GTK+ linux only. Indeed, they should be trying to make GTK+ more portable.

App writers may typically emphasize a certain OS as a target, but being able to port to other OSes without a complete rewrite is a huge benefit; if I'm trying to choose a UI toolkit for a project, "linux only" would be a big turnoff. Even if in practice a toolkit may work better on linux," there's a stark difference between "better" and "only."

This sort of balkanization is a mistake, and will make developers more reluctant to use GTK+.

[There seems to be a worrying tendency to conflate GTK+ and Gnome, but GTK+ is (at least so far) very useful outside of Gnome, and (er... so far) comes with a lot less baggage (political and otherwise).]

[baryluk]

wtf is going on with gnome lately? removal of metacity and gnome-panel, now this. This is really sad. All this talks about open standards, portability, etc. I know that there are some differences on systems, like device names, process statistics, epoll/kqueue, etc. But this isn't really big problem.

I use netbsd and freebsd, and gnome works on them perfectly, even faster than on linux, and would be very sad to not have it anymore.

[liam]

It's important to distinguish between "Gnome" and "GTK+". While there may be arguments for making Gnome "linux only" (I'd probably disagree with them -- portability can be a huge pain, but in the end almost always increases technical quality), GTK+ is different: I think it would be a huge mistake to make GTK+ linux only. Indeed, they should be trying to make GTK+ more portable.

App writers may typically emphasize a certain OS as a target, but being able to port to other OSes without a complete rewrite is a huge benefit; if I'm trying to choose a UI toolkit for a project, "linux only" would be a big turnoff. Even if in practice a toolkit may work better on linux," there's a stark difference between "better" and "only."

This sort of balkanization is a mistake, and will make developers more reluctant to use GTK+.

[There seems to be a worrying tendency to conflate GTK+ and Gnome, but GTK+ is (at least so far) very useful outside of Gnome, and (er... so far) comes with a lot less baggage (political and otherwise).]

That's why I made the distinction between the two (to continue with other gnome stack members you have things like pango, cairo, clutter, etc -- none of which will become Linux only). As for gtk itself I think it has shown with 3.0 that it is trying to become more xplatform so I don't think it will be joining gnome in this journey.

[airlied]

Red Hat is actively sabotaging the BSD since quite some time.
RH is the driving force in technologies like Wayland and RH is also responsible for relicensing Wayland away from a BSD-friendly MIT license to LGPL.

RH could've opted to release such code under MIT license: It's GPL compatible and the BSD teams could copy chunks of the code to make the new features available under the BSDs more easily.

Thanks to this story I was also made aware that hurting BSDs also means hurting Debian – probably RH’s biggest Linux contender.

RH as a company knew little about wayland, Kristian was mostly doing it as a personal project, he only relicensed it when he moved to Intel.

So how wrong and stupid does that make you look? fucking idiot.

Dave.

[vermaden]

what exactly could they add that would make gnome "linux only"? other than free-bsd and solaris, what else even uses gnome?

I would say NetBSD, OpenBSD, MINIX already has pkgsrc ported to it so count it in also, dunno about Darwin.

kde is the default for bsd as far as i'm aware.

KDE is default desktop for PC-BSD 8.0 (with FreeBSD under the hood), FreeBSD is like Debian/Gentoo, its default there what You choose to install there, same for other BSDs.

This clown actually works for RH?

Unfortunately ... yes, I also 'love' his 'brilliant' ideas.

However, if those APIs don't exist, they need to invent them - that's where projects like HAL and ConsoleKit and PolKit have come from. And if you invent APIs, you need to implement them, and from past experience, implementations for BSD (or anything else really) tend to be several years behind what's being done on Linux...

I would like to put phoenix input about that here:

FreeBSD has had devd since 5.0 was released many, many years ago. This is a kernel-level, event-driven notification framework for hardware. Everything devfs, new-devfs, udev, HAL, new-udev, and udisk wanted to be ... was already there.

It's very easy to add a script to an ACTION stanza in /etc/devd.conf to do whatever you want (mount a filesystem, import images, start a hot-spare replacement in ZFS, etc). And /etc/devfs.conf covers setting users/groups/permissions on devices nodes as they are created by devd.

powerd has been available in FreeBSD since the 5.0 days, and handles CPU power management with a bunch of options.

All of the *Kits have been available on FreeBSD fairly soon after they're available on Linux.

This is not an issue of "FreeBSD doesn't support the features we need" and more an issue of "FreeBSD does things properly, without changing every 5 minutes, and we don't know how to handle that".

The correct "solution" here is for "desktop" devs to stop using the kernel features directly and having to continuously rewrite things for udev, HAL, *Kit, u*, etc and instead to write to a standardised abstraction layer with pluggable backends. Something the KDE devs figured out with 4.0 and the creation of Solid and Phonon and similar.

Maybe the freedesktop.org community should get together and work on this abstraction layer, and then let the kernel devs from Linux/FreeBSD/whateverBSD/Solaris/etc work on the backends. A nice decoupling of the "desktop env" from the "kernel/u*/*Kit backends".

Either that, or all the desktop env projects need to remove things like "portable", "for Unix-like systems", "POSIX-compliant" and other such nonsence, and mark themselves as "Linux-only".

It's a bit similar to the KMS situation. And I think we're going to see more of this in the future. The *BSD people simply do not have the resources to keep up. When the time comes that they stand in the way of progress and become a burden, it's time to say goodbye

Well, the code is still open source so they can still port systemd or patch out the dependencies or whatever. More interesting is to see how Canonical is going to react to this.

BSDs have been here long before Ubuntu ... and will be long after it.

[kraftman]

Oh my god, surprise. The leading Linux distributor wants to see the competition damaged. Who would've thought…

Exactly. I don't like Gnome too much, but I like the idea. Focusing only on Linux will make Gnome experience better for Linux users.