<story><title>Everyone seems to forget why GNOME and GNOME 3 and Unity happened</title><url>https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/85359.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>emilsedgh</author><text>&amp;gt;  money was being thrown around&lt;p&gt;Im not really educated about the GNOME world, but I was involved on KDE side of things (very minor contributor). Money was _never_ thrown around. At best, a handful of engineers from a few different companies (TrollTech&amp;#x2F;Nokia, Novell&amp;#x2F;SUSE, Red Hat, Canonical) were hired to work full time and that was pretty much it. I don&amp;#x27;t think more than 10-15 engineers have done paid worked on KDE at any given time. Most of the contributions were volunteers.&lt;p&gt;There was a few attempts on KDE side to get paid by Intel to develop an office suite for mobile but it was also pretty small.&lt;p&gt;And to this date that is still the case with KDE. Very few engineers paid to work on it hired by entirely different set of companies like Blue Systems or Krita trying to make a living with very modest donations and contributions.&lt;p&gt;KDE is one of the biggest softwares out there. It was the first SVN repository to reach 1 million commits,  etc etc and most of it has been volunteer work. Any claim that money was thrown at KDE really upsets me because it would be a complete mischaracterization of the nature of the project and motivations of people behind it.&lt;p&gt;Your main point is valid though. FAT and SMB patents were more serious threats.</text></item><item><author>toyg</author><text>I think that MS here is being used as a convenient scapegoat. This worry was never expressed at the time in significant terms. The FAT and SMB patents were much more of a worry than anything related to the desktop interface - only outright clones were being pursued.&lt;p&gt;At the time, KDE, GNOME and Ubuntu developers alike, were simply drunk on popularity. Linux usage was in ascendancy, money was being thrown around, and the FOSS world was starting to attract young designers who saw it as a cheap way to build professional credibility. And then the iPhone happened and the whole UX world just went apeshit. The core teams really thought they had a shot at redesigning how people interact with computers, &amp;quot;like Apple did with phones&amp;quot;. Interaction targets moved from keyboard+mouse to touch screens, because &amp;quot;convergence&amp;quot; and the fact that the mobile sector was suddenly awash with cash.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s sad that people try to justify their missteps in this way. Microsoft was (and is) a terrible company and a constant threat to the FOSS ecosystem, but defining some of the biggest design choices of the Linux desktop only in antagonistic or reflective terms does a real disservice to those projects and the people who worked in them.&lt;p&gt;If experience is the name we give our errors, refusing to accept errors were made means stating you&amp;#x27;ve learnt nothing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>toyg</author><text>The fact that money didn&amp;#x27;t necessarily reach people doing the work, doesn&amp;#x27;t mean money wasn&amp;#x27;t thrown around &lt;i&gt;above their heads&lt;/i&gt; - which inevitably conditioned their choices. Novell didn&amp;#x27;t pay peanuts for SuSE, for example; nor did Ubuntu build a mobile OS for anything but to intercept money from mobile manufacturers. It was fairly plain to see that developers hired by those companies were given marching orders at various points; and because they inevitably were the core developers, projects steered accordingly.&lt;p&gt;(I would also add that, certainly in KDE circles, there was also a bit of a cultivated aura of rockstar developers around these fulltime hires, with folks making big calls without ever accepting they might be wrong... until several years (or decades) later.)</text></comment>
<story><title>Everyone seems to forget why GNOME and GNOME 3 and Unity happened</title><url>https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/85359.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>emilsedgh</author><text>&amp;gt;  money was being thrown around&lt;p&gt;Im not really educated about the GNOME world, but I was involved on KDE side of things (very minor contributor). Money was _never_ thrown around. At best, a handful of engineers from a few different companies (TrollTech&amp;#x2F;Nokia, Novell&amp;#x2F;SUSE, Red Hat, Canonical) were hired to work full time and that was pretty much it. I don&amp;#x27;t think more than 10-15 engineers have done paid worked on KDE at any given time. Most of the contributions were volunteers.&lt;p&gt;There was a few attempts on KDE side to get paid by Intel to develop an office suite for mobile but it was also pretty small.&lt;p&gt;And to this date that is still the case with KDE. Very few engineers paid to work on it hired by entirely different set of companies like Blue Systems or Krita trying to make a living with very modest donations and contributions.&lt;p&gt;KDE is one of the biggest softwares out there. It was the first SVN repository to reach 1 million commits,  etc etc and most of it has been volunteer work. Any claim that money was thrown at KDE really upsets me because it would be a complete mischaracterization of the nature of the project and motivations of people behind it.&lt;p&gt;Your main point is valid though. FAT and SMB patents were more serious threats.</text></item><item><author>toyg</author><text>I think that MS here is being used as a convenient scapegoat. This worry was never expressed at the time in significant terms. The FAT and SMB patents were much more of a worry than anything related to the desktop interface - only outright clones were being pursued.&lt;p&gt;At the time, KDE, GNOME and Ubuntu developers alike, were simply drunk on popularity. Linux usage was in ascendancy, money was being thrown around, and the FOSS world was starting to attract young designers who saw it as a cheap way to build professional credibility. And then the iPhone happened and the whole UX world just went apeshit. The core teams really thought they had a shot at redesigning how people interact with computers, &amp;quot;like Apple did with phones&amp;quot;. Interaction targets moved from keyboard+mouse to touch screens, because &amp;quot;convergence&amp;quot; and the fact that the mobile sector was suddenly awash with cash.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s sad that people try to justify their missteps in this way. Microsoft was (and is) a terrible company and a constant threat to the FOSS ecosystem, but defining some of the biggest design choices of the Linux desktop only in antagonistic or reflective terms does a real disservice to those projects and the people who worked in them.&lt;p&gt;If experience is the name we give our errors, refusing to accept errors were made means stating you&amp;#x27;ve learnt nothing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gjsman-1000</author><text>Even after FAT was cleared up, exFAT was under patents until, like, 2019 before Microsoft declared they wouldn&amp;#x27;t enforce them on Linux. That was kind of an issue for a while as exFAT is the mandatory file format of SDXC cards. If you had a SD card &amp;gt;=64GB before then, Linux wasn&amp;#x27;t mainlining support because the situation was too risky.</text></comment>