Havoc, the main thrust of your response was about valuing design skills in the development process. Note that I didn’t question this at all in my entry, and I explicitly distanced my comments from the specifics of the notifications discussion before I began.
You don’t need to defend the skills of Bryan, Seth, Calum and others. No one is questioning them at all, and their design skills were certainly not the focus of my comments. In my entry, I explained why members of our community would have a strong reaction to Colin’s citing of the “GNOME design team”, which does not exist in any material form. It would be great for developers to go to a design team and talk to them about great ways of solving problems. I’ve harangued Calum for years to head up the GUP, but he doesn’t have the time or inclination to do so. If we’re going to start talking about a GNOME design team, then we actually need to have something that looks and feels like it. Blogs are not a replacement for comprehensible structure or process!
This process is what I raised with Seth, and others, at GUADEC. How do we collaborate? How do we make it work in a community context? If Seth is too lazy or jaded to do it, and laughs at Bryan for trying, then I’m not putting my money on Seth to fix the problem. Perhaps I should take a stab at putting together a community process myself (regardless of my comparatively meagre HCI training)…
JP, I understand why you’ve responded about software development contributions, but that was not the subject of my comments. It is quite a different issue to the community design process issues that I’m chiefly concerned about. I’ll answer a couple of your comments though:
- Canonical doesn’t focus on new software development, but does sponsor it. The main work that Ubuntu developers do is integration, which does involve software development.
- The Launchpad tools aren’t open source now, but they’re certainly headed that way, though I don’t think there’s a useful timeline for it yet.
- There won’t be an ‘enterprise version’ of Ubuntu released in April. It’ll be a normal release with a five year support lifecycle.
Update: Joe, I wasn’t really comparing netapplet and NetworkManager as beautiful solutions, just using them as an example of unfortunate duplicate work (future-proof or not), and a perspective on how and why they were released. We write some pretty ugly throwaway code in Ubuntu-land too. 
