GNOME vs Canonical

[Darcy Casselman]

Hugh (and Raymond),

This probably doesn't mean much of anything at all to a plain old user
of Linux.  Ubuntu isn't going away.  Gnome isn't going away.  The
petty in-fighting might hinder our ability to take over the world, but
that's been the case for twenty years or so, so nothing new there.

In a nutshell, Canonical (the corporate sponsor of Ubuntu) is
frustrated with its working relationship with the Gnome project and
its management, and have voiced those opinions publicly.

Gnome sees Ubuntu's new Unity interface (built largely by Canonical
developers but not without input and support from the Ubuntu
community) as a threat and has been voicing their concerns,
frustration and distrust of Canonical for months.  There was also a
controversy about Canonical's handling of Amazon MP3 referral money in
Banshee (the new default music player) that frankly didn't help
matters.

And the Ubuntu community (ie., us, unless you use Kubuntu, in which
case you're looking on bemusedly from the sidelines) is caught in the
middle.  But honestly, if you didn't care about the political back and
forth between free/open source software groups before, you probably
don't need to care any more about it now.

Darcy.

On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 9:11 AM, Hugh McDevitt <crustyasp46 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Can anyone explain what all this means to a newcomer to LInux? if
> he/she decides to install Ubuntu as a noob is the experience with the
> new release going to be more difficult or is it going to be a better
> expeience than in the past? Just curious. Thanks.
>
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