John, I agree that Davyd’s reaction to this has been somewhat unproductive. However, I have resisted blogging about it for most of the day because I tend to feel the same way. Note that it really has nothing to do with the technical conversation at hand (notifications).
Colin mentioned that libnotify and friends were “not an implementation of the GNOME design team’s design”. There is no “GNOME design team”. It does not exist in any official (or reasonably comprehensible unofficial) capacity whatsoever, so mentioning it in this way tends to be taken somewhat offensively. Why? Well, those of us outside the Red Hat and Novell cube walls hear very brief snippets of work being done entirely outside of the community development process, which engenders cynicism, frustration and mistrust.
This was raised at GUADEC numerous times, because it is hurting our community. Look back at the netapplet/NetworkManager debacle. I tend to think that NetworkManager only became a public project as soon as it did because netapplet development was opened up (and it only seemed to happen because Luis managed to leak a screenshot of it in his blog).
Yes, I totally understand that doing software design in a community context is very difficult. But specifically avoiding the community, duplicating work, keeping innovative GNOME work behind the curtain, and pushing away collaborators and contributors is seriously hurting our community.
Now, that said, I think we’re rocking along very nicely despite all of this mess. What concerns me is how the community (which includes all of us: companies, developers and users) will respond when Red Hat or Novell start to pull back the curtain. Because broad buy-in has not been established during design and development, large lumps of code will turn up, disagreements built on mistrust will arise, and choices will have to be made.
So, Red Hat and Novell dudes, I really hope you guys will realise that fixing this is in your best interests, both socially and commercially.
