[OT] Slugworth

[Richmond]

On 03/13/2013 06:14 PM, Peter Alcibiades wrote:
> Richmond is right in one respect, the Mir episode shows the kind of difficult
> choice of approach that LiveCode is going to come up against.  Canonical
> does seem to have the approach of make it and throw it over the wall, source
> code and all.  The danger is that the project gets forked by people who have
> a vision and want to make contributions but feel they are being shut out.
>
> The other side of the same coin is that a small team simply can't manage the
> chaos of incompatible contributions and submissions by people less than well
> qualified who want to rewrite chunks of the product, and gets swamped or
> feel they are losing control.
>
> You can see quite a few examples of forking if you look.  xfree86 vanished
> without trace.  Libreoffice is picking up speed and being the standard in
> most distros.  Mysql seems to have been forked. The Unity approach is too
> close to the Windows 8 approach for me to be comfortable with it.  Its very
> much take it or leave it, and it looks to me like that same approach is what
> is killing both KDE and Gnome 3.  I don't know of cases where people have
> been unable to manage community based products but am sure there must be
> some.
>
> It feels like very much the right decision to open source, and the level of
> support was very encouraging, but it remains a brave decision, and an awful
> lot is going to hang on the execution on this very point.  I very much hope
> they manage it better than either Gnome, KDE or Canonical.
>

Well, at present I use XFCE 4.10 on my "production machine" (that sounds 
a lot more pretentious
than it really is), as does my wife and younger son (older one has 
'rebelled' and uses Windows 7; LOL),
am currently 'playing' with 'Elementary OS(Luna)' on my other machine: 
quite nice if you don't want icons on a desktop. In my school I have 8 
machines running various incarnations of Ubuntu, Xubuntu and Edubuntu 
from 5.60 to 12.04 using GNOME 2, GNOME "Fallback", XFCE, and the 
Edubuntu 7.x hybrid; all are usable straight away by the kids I teach, 
in a way which Unity is not and nor is KDE 4.x.

The Macintoshes I use (several G3 iMacs) run 10.4 (honestly cannot see a 
good reason to install Linux PPC), and the Faux Mac (VMWare) runs 10.6.

BUT, then, the only thing, oddly enough, that made me hesitate before 
pledging my 'bit' to the Kickstarter was the mockup of the new GUI, as I 
think the 'current' one is better.

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RunRev have several choices:

1. Trying to keep absolutely everybody happy (it ain't going to happen).

2. Keeping nobody happy be dictating from on high (turn off).

3. A "very happy tightrope walk" between #1 and #2.

4. Allowing a wide variety of forks of the GUI all sitting on a 
monolithic IDE.

5. Brain Salad Surgery.

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Richmond.

Richmond.