what do you think guys about the userlinux decision of making gnome the official manager >?

Salamo 3alaikom,

For those who like and use Gnome it is a good news while it is not for those who are crazy about KDE. It won't make any difference for those who use other DE (Desktop environment). Such discussion was mentioned on www.osnews.com.

Salam.

you need to put in mind what are the goals of the UserLinux project.

please check the UserLinux whitepaper and other related docs at http://www.userlinux.com/

for what its worth here is my opinion and reasoning as stated on the UserLinux mailing list (list archive is down so I'll just quote the whole thing).

cheers,
Alaa


>
> "In order to provide a platform to corporations and ISV's that they
> are most likely to buy into, the officially supported desktop
> environment and developer toolsets need to be bounded.

exactly.

the plan seems to be to have a large group of companies varying in size
all offering services and support from UserLinux, with some form of
certification to make them official UserLinux companies.
the distro itself will be developed by these companies and the users.

the point that people seem to be missing is that an official UserLinux
services provider has to be able to support all UserLinux packages
(thats my understanding of the whitepaper).

the more we put into the core of UserLinux the more we raise the barrier
of entry in this services industry.

now some have suggested that instead of this we can have companies
targeting different subsets and aspect of UserLinux and as such you
could have one company supporting developer ISVs targeting Gnome apps
and another company supporting developers targeting developers of KDE
apps, with the possibility of these companies cooperating and
outsourcing whenever a client of theirs needs something they can't
provide.

there are some problems I can see with this scheme.
it makes things for the client complicated, the decision of which
support company to contract suddenly involves knowing about all these
package sets and choosing between them.

service companies can divide the market between them (specially if its a
small or emerging market) greatly reducing the benefits of competition
between.

a very small market where only a small number of companies exists
suddenly becomes a big problem since they may not support all of
UserLinux between them.

this opens possibilities for lockin into a single service provider ala
RedHat

the whitepaper talks about support organizations, these organizations
may not be competing companies.
for instance where I come from (Egypt) Universities often create
services and support centers for emerging technologies, that basically
work for free to encourage the adoption of such technologies and to
develop the market and to solve the chicken and egg problem of no one
offering support until a sizable market exists....
an organization like this one may affect how the future UserLinux market
will look like, it cannot be allowed to offer selective support to only
parts of UserLinux and still be called an official support organization.

However the whitepaper allows for these organization to offer support
and even bundle more packages (including proprietary packages), if the
unified/standardised UserLinux code is not sufficient for most/all basic
needs the situation will quickly revert to what I described above since
most customers will demand extra package sets (this would be even worse
because it will lead to competing distros all calling themselves
UserLinux).

thats why we have Mozilla, OpenOffice etc and not just Gnome, just
Gnome will not satisfy anyone and will break the whole scheme.
now seeing that the users of UserLinux and its official support
organizations will be the ones making all the decisions if the initial
selection proved to be insufficient they can add to it easily.
If an add on package is very popular we know it should be added.