Havoc Pennington has long been one of the pioneers of the Linux desktop movement, and a primary GNOME developer. Once at Red Hat, now at Litl (cool name, by the way), Havoc should be the poster boy for Linux desktop advocacy.
Nope.
In a recent blog post, Havoc rubbished the idea of anyone needing a new (traditional) desktop:
GNOME 2.0 and KDE 4 are bad models for change. They rewrote and broke the code, but from a user-goals perspective, they are the same thing as before. We shouldn't feel bad; Windows Vista made the same mistake. Nobody cares about Vista, because XP allows users to accomplish all the same goals. Even if Vista didn't have a bunch of regressions, nobody would really care about it.
The fact is that people already have a desktop. They don't want a new desktop from GNOME, from Apple, or from Microsoft. Making another desktop does not add anything to the world. On average, people who have GNOME want to keep it, and the same for the other desktops.
I agree. I've long argued that what is needed is not Yet Another Desktop, but rather a novel conception of what "desktop" means. Microsoft won the desktop war. Time to move on to the next battle. It's not about Vista or GNOME. It's about what "office productivity" means and where I do it.
Hint: Not in Office.
Recent research suggests that much of the core development work on open-source projects is done by paid developers. Is this a bad thing?
The answer is in the data. I just finished reading Evangelia Berdou's Ph.D. thesis "Managing the Bazaar: Commercialization and peripheral participation in mature, community-led Free/Open source software projects," and highly recommend it to anyone seeking to understand how open-source communities operate, especially in light of the increasing encroachment of commercial interests into open-source development communities. Berdou looks at paid vs. unpaid developer contributions to GNOME (GNU Network Object Model Environment) and KDE (K Desktop Environment) and reaches some interesting, if unsurprising, results.
Berdou starts with four primary hypotheses, only two of which end up making the grade:
- Paid developers are more likely to contribute to critical parts of the code base.
- Paid developers are more likely to maintain critical parts of the code base.
- Volunteer contributors are more likely to participate in aspects of the project that are geared towards the end-user.
- Programmers and peripheral contributors are not likely to participate equally in major community events. (134)
Only Nos. 2 and 4 end up surviving her analysis, though her data (and my experience) suggests that No. 1 is also true.
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