Apollo
by havoc
Seth: for every cool
thing that someone does, there were 100 people sitting around saying
“we should do something cool” 😉 Keep making it happen.
People forget too quickly how huge some of the battles were that made
GNOME what it is today. In my day, we didn’t have time-based releases
or basic UI sanity or HI guidelines, and we liked it. These things
that are orthodoxy today used to be heresy.
Look at Linux on the server: kernel 2.0 was a laughable toy, 2.6 is a
hugely scalable enterprise OS. But you don’t go straight to
enterprise OS. First somebody has to make the keyboard driver work.
First you have to get some customers and userbase. Then you have the
tools and the growth to take the next step.
The Apollo program had one luxury we don’t have, namely it was one of
the most amazing time and money sinks of all time. We have to evolve
such that each evolutionary step is usable and attracts more users
(and thus developers). Open source developers are attracted first and
foremost to working code that they’re using themselves. If cool were
everything, we’d all be hacking on Enlightenment.
Cool things happen via a thousand small, practical steps. It’s just
that you don’t usually notice these, unless you were the person taking
them.
And so the moral of the story is, while someone should make the X
server support smooth 3D graphics and implement the next generation of
UI on top of it (and in fact people are taking steps toward
that today), someone else should fix
the session manager so my splash screen doesn’t get stuck every
time I log in. You knew I was getting to that!
(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2003-10.html#29.2)