21–30 of 35 posts
Posts like these really show the problems in the current free software development world; balkanization between different stakeholders and bizarre processes that alternate between bureaucracy and anarchy. Watching the tug-of-war between Red Hat and Canonical play itself out in the form of dysfunctional community development process is depressing. I'm aware that watching sausage being made never makes you very hungry,…
These problems might take forever to solve [as the organisations are large]... In the meantime, I wouldn't be surprised if someone came up with a better technology model as a replacement. Id like to see a desktop development model more like modern web development - UI in HTML5/javascript/SVG, json data messaging, UI & system events coming from a port [eg. shinetech/eventserver], able to write small server-like plugin…
One of the most important changes is the gobject-introspection work, which allows library authors to annotate their library's API in a way that allows bindings to be automatically created for any language. This is how GNOME Shell is able to use Javascript to call into GTK+3. Developers wanting to develop for GTK+ in their favorite language, be it Ruby, Python, Lisp, C#, D, or anything else, don't have to write bindings themselves or wait for someone else to write them.
Many new GNOME applications and libraries are being written in Vala, a language with an object model based on GObject but a syntax like C#. It offers a modern language with garbage collection, and everything compiles down to C in the end. The same compiler can also compile a language called Genie, which is designed to have a syntax similar to Python (although, in my opinion, it hasn't done a great job at that yet, and I've seen no use of the language in the wild). It also compiles down to C.
Tensions are high in the FOSS desktop world right now but that's nothing new. Flare ups like this come and go. Sometimes the problems are fixed and we find new ones to argue about a few years down the line. Sometimes the wounds fester, become gangrenous, and people leave for good.
Most of us just want to write code we can use and have fun writing.
These problems might take forever to solve [as the organisations are large]... In the meantime, I wouldn't be surprised if someone came up with a better technology model as a replacement. Id like to see a desktop development model more like modern web development - UI in HTML5/javascript/SVG, json data messaging, UI & system events coming from a port [eg. shinetech/eventserver], able to write small server-like plugin…
Can anyone point me to a good architecture/dev overview of Gnome Shell and Unity ? I find it hard to sift out the marketing from the tech in what Ive seen.
A technical overview can be found at Owen Taylor's blog http://blog.fishsoup.net/2008/10/22/implementing-the-next-gn... It's old, from when the shell was just being planned, but all the major architectural decisions are there.
Posts like these really show the problems in the current free software development world; balkanization between different stakeholders and bizarre processes that alternate between bureaucracy and anarchy. Watching the tug-of-war between Red Hat and Canonical play itself out in the form of dysfunctional community development process is depressing. I'm aware that watching sausage being made never makes you very hungry,…
Democracy is inefficient.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Democracy is inefficient.
This type of lazy thinking in generalizations amazes me. Inefficient at what? If you mean it's inefficient for rapid decision making, I wholeheartedly agree. If you mean inefficient at allowing people to express themselves, I disagree.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This type of lazy thinking in generalizations amazes me. Inefficient at what? If you mean it's inefficient for rapid decision making, I wholeheartedly agree. If you mean inefficient at allowing people to express themselves, I disagree.
Fair enough - Open systems explore the landscape of all possible systems through diverse implementation and designs. This diversity sometimes leads to open systems finding the global optima, but even in less ideal circumstances the various different approaches reach a local optima for some subset of user needs. Closed systems on the other hand try to reach the global maxima by analysis, design and 'vision'. The origi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fair enough - Open systems explore the landscape of all possible systems through diverse implementation and designs. This diversity sometimes leads to open systems finding the global optima, but even in less ideal circumstances the various different approaches reach a local optima for some subset of user needs. Closed systems on the other hand try to reach the global maxima by analysis, design and 'vision'. The origi…
You bring up an interesting phenomenon: well-developed open source environments share a cut-throat competitive culture for consumer mindshare rather similarly to multinational corporations. I wonder if there is a scalability issue in human management where at some point we go berserk trying to define the mainstream.
It's so sad that such great ideas are just so dysfunctional.
(not trolling, I honestly don't know what it is that you mean)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This type of lazy thinking in generalizations amazes me. Inefficient at what? If you mean it's inefficient for rapid decision making, I wholeheartedly agree. If you mean inefficient at allowing people to express themselves, I disagree.
Fair enough - Open systems explore the landscape of all possible systems through diverse implementation and designs. This diversity sometimes leads to open systems finding the global optima, but even in less ideal circumstances the various different approaches reach a local optima for some subset of user needs. Closed systems on the other hand try to reach the global maxima by analysis, design and 'vision'. The origi…