Havoc's Blog

Aaron,
there is no standards committee or standards body at
freedesktop.org. freedesktop.org right now is the equivalent of
Sourceforge, essentially, except that projects have to be desktop-related.

I fully agree with outreach and that is what the successful projects
have done. e.g. for fontconfig, Keith Packard went and talked to GTK+,
Qt, Mozilla and even provided patches to all three of those
IIRC. Writing the patches taught him what would be workable.

If the D-Conf developers don’t do outreach then they are taking
the risk that their project won’t be adopted. There’s no risk to us
(us being GNOME and KDE). Waldo and I are going out of our way a bit
to give them feedback whether they ask or not, but they still have to
get things approved by GNOME and KDE as a whole, and if their
ambitions are beyond GNOME and KDE, they have to get Mozilla and
OO.org and Samba and whoever else they care about as well.

Precisely because freedesktop.org is not a standards committee,
though, there’s no freedesktop.org policy to outreach or not
outreach. And nobody to say which config system to use. If someone else
has E-Conf and F-Conf and Q-Conf then they can all post to the
list, and they can all have some CVS space (once they have some actual
code and look plausible), and they can fight it out until one of them
successfully gets adopted by the major projects. Or maybe the major
projects will choose something not hosted on freedesktop.org at
all, or stick with their current stuff, and that’s fine too.

You may ask “what’s this about a freedesktop.org platform”;
here
is my original suggestion on that and I
think this is my latest comment. Let me quote from that last one:

The “stack” concept is useful but NOT for technology pimping.
A goal of the stack should be to show which technology is *well-cooked*
– and part of the definition of “well-cooked” is “widely de facto shown
to be useful.” So it doesn’t make sense to use the stack to “push” or
promote technologies, since “already accepted” should be a gating
principle.

While some people may have other ideas, I will again reiterate that
KDE and GNOME can veto anything by simply not going along with
it. That’s the core reason I don’t understand any paranoia here.

(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2005-04.html#11)