My request to ubuntu developer team

[Avi Greenbury]

Alan McKay wrote:

> I'm fine with change as long as it is change for the better.   Change
> for the sake of change on the other hand is foolish, and that seems to
> me to be what is driving this move.

Publicly, at least, the change is apparently sparked by a feeling that
we've spent a long time assuming we got UI design right about 15 years
ago, but that that sort of interface is beginning to look inappropriate
for the current ways they're being used - it's hard to provide a
consistent interface between small mobile devices and a PC when the PC
UI doesn't scale in a usable way to the mobile device, for example. The
assumption that people *want* that is, of course, open to question, but
there's only one way to find out :)

> And it looks to me like everyone is rushing to try to copy Apple.

Not really. Apple's one of the companies being copied, and doing the
copying. In general, when someone gets something right, everybody else
starts doing it. It's nothing new and not really a bad
sign.

> Traditionally one of the strong points of Open Source software has
> been that it is highly configurable so you can have it any way you
> want, as long as you can do the config. Well, that long tradition of
> Open Source seems to be on its death bed right now because now even
> here, the developers are saying "our way, or the highway"

No they aren't. They're saying "our way or another way of your
choosing". Gnome 3 might be hilariously incompatible with a bunch of de
facto standards, but there's no lock in - you can go and run all the
same apps on whatever other DE you like. You can even just decide to
stick with Gnome 2.x.

The problem is not that Gnome 2.x is now not allowed to be used, it's
that those who have maintained it thus far are not any more. The Mate
project is a very good illustration of the way that Free Software
*prevents* the 'my way or the highway' problem - if you want to keep
using Gnome 2.x, you're free to take it and keep using it. If you want
to maintain it, you're free to do that, too. If you'd like to integrate
it into whatever wicked cool projects you've got going on, you can do
that, too. And, if you don't want to do it yourself, then anybody else
is able to.

> I'm not just mourning change.  I'm mourning the death of an entire
> philosophy.

It's not even the endangering of a philosophy. Changes like this happen
all the time in Free Software, and if enough people want the old way,
then they just fork it and maintain it themselves.

-- 
Avi