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rickyclarkson reported this complaint as inaccurate on 02/18/2007 @ 04:53:22

I disagree, Linus is a developer, it's about approaches to development and GNOME is software that most of us are familiar with, and some of us have modified.

Not only that, but I'm getting you back in a childish way for complaining about a complaint of mine. ;)

What I find very interesting was that the article originally said that he submitted patches to the Gnome Print Dialog. The article now just says that he submitted patches. Why was it changed?

If you look at the Digg item for the article, you'll see the original text preserved in the text of the link: http://digg.com/linux_unix/Linus_fires_latest_shot_in_GNOME_Wars

What this whole article really boils down to is that one guy(Linus) checked in some code. Not very development related, but then I'll stand behind anybody that wants to push the Gnome guys to innovate a little more.

Really, there's more to this - first, you've got Linus' (in)famous ability for abrasively expressing his opinion. Then you have the tendency of the GNOME dev. core to be overly defensive of their design decisions.

I myself have submitted code to GNOME (WiFi config) that was rejected, on pretty much the same grounds as Linus' printer patches. I simply unsubscribed from the bug report that prompted to me to write the patch, said "to hell with it" and switched to using a different piece of software. Of course, I'm not exactly a Type A personality like I think Linus is.

The mix of ideologies, egos, and investments each party has made in OSS and GNU plays a part in this little piece of drama and I think it's a fine example of how personal politics plays a role in the development of many "community" software projects.

To be fair, to both parties, here's my opinion on the matter: I happen to agree with Linus about GNOME, but if the GNOME folks don't want to accept his patches they don't have to. Linus should just suck it up, or start his own fork. The GNOME core needs to learn to deal with criticism with some more class. (OK, so could Linus)

I primarily use GNOME as my desktop, and it works 90% for me... the other 10% I either code on my own (apt-build combined with pinning is your friend) or I use alternative solutions. It's not perfect, but the alternative of KDE gives me vertigo - I *like* simplicity.

The link most definitely has developer content.

I think its very developer related...maybe not in the tutorial sense of the term, but its about some very big hoohahs in the open source world exchanging criticisms, and how each side responds to the other.

It's significant in a peripheral sense, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find a direct developer relation.