Re: [gentoo-user] Unity on Gentoo?

[Stroller]

On 25 September 2011, at 21:21, Canek Peláez Valdés wrote:
>> …
>> At the moment there are very mixed feelings about Unity. There are a good number of people who hate it, but there are some others who say "I love it, except that I hate that it doesn't let me move the menu bar". Because Unity is still young, we don't yet see a mass of people who are wanting and eager to use it for its functionality's sake. But it does address some issues with Gnome3, for some people, I believe.
>>
>> The end users do not give a monkey's uncle about the CLA. They just want to use the software, and our distro already provides Sun Java binaries, Unreal Tournament and stuff under all sorts of licenses. If people want to use it, and it's in the package manager, then they will. You are very much an exception, IMO, taking ethical exception to Canonical's CLA.
>
> It's not ethical: It's practical. Canonical's CLA makes it so that
> most (if not all of the) development of Unity will come from
> developers payed by Canonical. The whole direction for the project
> will come from Canonical.

You're perfectly right - it's quite clear that the Unity programmers take direction from Canonical's (Shuttleworth's?) design direction. It's not a case of "let's add this cool feature", it's a case of meeting a greater whole. And some people disagree with that greater whole, as it exists at the moment.

Nevertheless, that's the case for Gnome, too. 

If people like the end result, they'll use it.


> …  Any code
> from Unity can be used in GNOME (if so the developers desire).

1) I'm not sure if that's true.

"GNOME is part of the GNU Project" [1], "Before incorporating significant changes, make sure that the person who wrote the changes has signed copyright papers". [2]

I'm glad to be corrected on this, if I'm mistaken.


2) Excepting that, it won't. The whole reason for Unity is that Shuttleworth and Gnome disagree on certain design decisions.

IIRC according to Shuttleworth he approached GNOME developers regarding this (I think his particular focus was notifications) and agreed that Ubuntu would make some changes which would be integrated into Gnome shell. The code was completed, and then someone else at Gnome, who was in charge of "design overview", decided they were doing to take a slightly different approach, and that none of Ubuntu's work was of any use to them. The story is disputed from both sides, of course, and it seems like this is a genuine misunderstanding, but it's quite clear that Gnome don't want to utilise Unity's code.


3) Excepting that, if Gnome or anyone else *were* to take code from Unity, it would not be part of "Unity's doom", but it would be Unity's success - it would mean more people using software based on Unity.  

Stroller.



[1] http://foundation.gnome.org/
[2] http://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/html_node/Copyright-Papers.html#Copyright-Papers