Re: [gentoo-user] Unity on Gentoo?

[Canek Peláez Valdés]

On Sun, Sep 25, 2011 at 5:56 AM, James Broadhead
<jamesbroadhead@×××××.com> wrote:
> On 25 September 2011 03:15, Nilesh Govindarajan <contact@××××××××.com> wrote:
>> It's stunning to know that something that's shipped by default with
>> Ubuntu sucks so much? Canonical surely must have gone haywire.
>
> It wouldn't be the first time that they've effectively tested software
> by pushing it out to their user-base.
>
> PuuuuuuuuuulseAudio!

You are right about Ubuntu pushing PulseAudio before it was ready, and
(more worrisome) they did it without doing their homework (as the
author of PulseAudio says himself):

http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/jeffrey-stedfast.html

But with Unity the problem is much more than being pushed before time:
Unity is a project sponsored by Canonical, and if you want to
contribute code to it, you need to sign a "Contributor License
Agreement" (CLA), where you basically waive all copyright of your code
to Canonical, and let them do anything with it. That's why nobody
(except Ubuntu) is touching Unity with a three meters pole.

You can find Unity packages for Debian and Fedora, and I think it
would be an interesting project to make an ebuild of it. Some
developer with enough time and interest will do it. But I can almost
guarantee that Unity will not be used massively by any distribution
that is not Ubuntu: And in the end that's what Canonical wants. They
want Ubuntu to be "different" to other distros, to have "an edge".
Hence the CLA, so they can do whatever they want with it, even change
license if so they want.

The success of PulseAudio (like it or not many people) is shown in the
fact that *every* distribution is using it, it's a  dependency of
GNOME (and it's a hard dependency on GNOME 3), and by now almost
everybody agrees it works the way it's supposed to.

Unity on the other hand will never be really used outside of Ubuntu,
for the reasons I listed above. If not by the CLA, I probably would
try Unity, even though I am really happy with my GNOME 3 desktop.
Maybe it has really interesting ideas.

But I really not care about any of them if they will be controlled by
only one company for only one distribution. And besides, it's not even
the distribution I use.

Regards.
-- 
Canek Peláez Valdés
Posgrado en Ciencia e Ingeniería de la Computación
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México