On Wednesday 04 August 2010 15:22:26 Dominique Leuenberger wrote:
[...] Now you assume that you can shift resources around, which is perfectly valid point in a company organization. In a volunteers world this is not going to work. If I have to choose between working on project A for distribution X as my only 'work space', then I might as well just define that distribution X is not what I want to invest my time into. so instead of shifting resources and focusing them, you alienate a part of the community, have them leave or get inactive for not fully backing the new 'strategy' up. You might possibly win new resources, once your 'one-desktopto-rule-them-all' is polished enough. But reaching this with less resources will certainly not be so easy. And if the new contributors would join in the state the project is now: why would they not do it just because some other group takes care of a second UI stack?
I agree with Dominique on this, if openSUSE goes this direction, I cannot see a single person working on GNOME switching to working on KDE. We even would lose directly since GNOME developers maintain packages that are needed for both GNOME and KDE or for the complete distribution. The two main desktops both have their place since they handle many things differently, the different philosophies behind them help to bring both forward (competition is good!). I agree that much more could be done in working together with common infrastructure - e.g. like both Akanodi and Evolution developed in the last 12 months their own new IMAP libraries ;-(. Also, I've heard last year that changing the installation to make KDE the default installed desktop would bring us so many KDE developers that help to polish the openSUSE KDE desktop. I'm not seeing that many new faces ;-( Andreas -- Andreas Jaeger, Program Manager openSUSE, aj@{novell.com,opensuse.org} Twitter: jaegerandi | Identica: jaegerandi SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg, Germany GPG fingerprint = 93A3 365E CE47 B889 DF7F FED1 389A 563C C272 A126