I’ve just gotten a comment on my last blog post that reads;
“Why is this on planet gnome? Who gives a shit about you and your proprietary OS?”
Now, I’m not adverse to taking acerbic comments, I write some pretty provocative posts from time to time, expressing my opinions, ranting about this or that and to posts like that I expect a certain amount of debate and argument. I even come to expect threatening and purely insulting comments which are redirected to dev null.
However this comment, which flies in the face of;
“Planet GNOME is a window into the world, work and lives of GNOME hackers and contributors.”
is more than a bit much. Not only does no one apparently care about OSX, but nobody cares about me either…
To clarify, I use MacOSX and Windows as well as loving Linux and GNOME. Linux doesn’t do everything I need to do so its necessary from time to time to use a proprietary OS… However, as OSX is built on top of mostly open source software, adheres to open standards is generally accepted by GNOME developers as something worth taking a look at I don’t think I’ve crossed any ideological divide here.
I feel like I’ve just had to defend myself for doing nothing wrong *sigh*
Anyway, the point of this post is to call out the hostile readership of planet gnome. Those readers who will personally attack people ‘anonymously’ (henry.tss.usg.edu), need to be made aware how they damage the community, damage developers perception of who we are doing this for and in the end do nothing to make themselves heard, in this case the hostile reader got to be heard, because I honestly think it’s time we outed them for what they are.
Also, this little bit of wordpress comment info made me chuckle;
“User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.219.4 Safari/532.1″
I guess this hostile reader didn’t realise that chrome is built on apples webkit project, and relies on EVIL PROPRIETARY CODE!!!! Oh, no wait… Erm Apple kept webkit nice and open didn’t they.
To end, here’s a note to pigeons in the wise words of Fletch from Porridge;
“One – bide your time. Two – keep your nose clean. And three – don’t let the bastards grind you down.” – I’ve searched for the video for this to no avail. Hopefully someone can poke a youtube link of it into the comments.
Update: This isn’t going to turn into an ideological debate about apple and their practises either so you people can stop commenting about that.
You’re turning yourself into one giant flame-bait, mate. There are so many reasons why voting for Apple financially is a bad idea. I would guess most readers of Planet GNOME know them inside out.
You’ve got to admit that it’s a very bad sign when even the developers of a desktop interface decide to use another one, one’s that’s not even dominant. Why should you expect users to suffer GNOME, if you won’t suffer using it?
“Those readers [...] damage developers perception of who we are doing this for”
And blog posts like these damage users’ perception of whether developers actually care. Using Mac OS X questions your love of GNOME on Linux. Isn’t obvious?
I know I’m not helping you feel much better here. If it helps, I use proprietary software all the time, and I’m an open-source developer of sorts. I sympathise with you and with the disappointed user here.
Dude… Don’t question my love… Don’t ever question my love!
I use mac osx in my bedroom on my imac which I use for various streaming purposes as if it were a bedroom TV if you will… also listening to music and such like in another room and the odd bit of use of some proprietary apps for macosx, I also use windows on the same machine (nobody seems to care? wtf, is it just apple that people hate now?) for things like flashing phones and alike.
This isn’t my on main machine, which is always running linux and gnome on apple hardware (because it is gorgeous, and I am a total style whore, and it’s got a frickin’ backlit keyboard!!!), I have OSX installed on it, although I’m not even sure if I’ve ever actually booted OSX on this machine since I got it since bootcamping and installing linux.
We’re all consumers at the end of the day, and if people want to hold up this torch of IP freedoms in such a strict way then they should throw their TV out of the window, and rip their phone out of the wall… as both of those are inventions stolen, patented and exploited.
Well, Chrome on Linux (which I use every day) which is what your poster posted with is proprietary software. Like Safari is based on open source WebKit, Chrome is based on open source Chromium.
Of course, arseholes are just arseholes.
I seem to be unable to shift a scene from team america from my head…
I’m on your side, Karl. I use virtually every operating system known to man or woman at one point or another. In particular, I use OS X because there’s no substitute for Final Cut Pro when you’re doing video production.
I also prefer Photoshop and Illustrator to GIMP and Inkscape, personally. Software is a tool, not an ideology, and using an inferior tool to get an inferior result because it better suits your ideology means that you value your ideology more than your results, as far as I can tell.
I just want to say thanks for making gtk/gnome stuff work on OSX. In the Haskell world we’re trying to sell Gtk+ as the one true cross-platform GUI lib and the sore point is always OSX. So we really value the work that people have been putting into making it work (at all, and better in future).
I didn’t do the aforementioned work but, I’m sure if those who did read these comments it makes them warm and fuzzy inside.
Karl,
In the past I have disagreed with you on many issues, but on this post I completely agree with you. These people need to get a hobby other than trolling comments.
Dude I love people disagreeing with me, I live for it, change my opinions, maybe I change yours… Lets debate and argue, but trolling?… its getting worse recently too!
It would be more useful for those developers who also use Mac OSX to put together lists of reasons why you feel you have to turn to Apple to get your work done, for the purpose of improving the Gnome platform.
Video edit’s been mentioned in comments; it’s a clear area where free software lags.
> OSX is built on top of mostly open source software,
> adheres to open standards
>
You should talk to the people writing interoperability stuff with OS X some more – I’m thinking about Cairo or Mozilla people here, but I guess the Gtk+ crew is fine, too – they’re complaining about Apple’s secret APIs all the time.
I also marvel the Open Sourceness of the iPhone and not being able to update my own WebKit code on that device. That’s pure GPL love right there.
It’s worth keeping in mind that “video edit” is more than just the “sticking-together-bits-of-video” part. We have the sound end (largely) covered, but there’s no open source equivalent for, e.g., Motion, to do titling and such, etc…
@Joe, tell you what huh, I’ll take valuable time out of my day to write down a list of all the things I use OSX for so anally retentive software ideology driven freetards will have a nice list of things that they can spend their valuable time ignoring….
There are already billions of these lists, and yet no code…
Open source REALLY doesn’t work like that… I don’t write some code because I need to fulfil my ideology I write it because I want to scratch an itch. Sometimes a specific itch, sometimes it’s a wider thing that I want to get my ideas for interaction across or whatever.
@Ben, I’m not affected by these issues with secret api’s or whatever other nonsense, I use OSX as a consumer desktop, I don’t want to hack on it, I want it to run my software without “Oh shit now I have to fix X before I can watch a movie”
@lefty, one of the big problems with editing video on linux is that there are still videos which work in mplayer but don’t in gstreamer, same with xine, so our dream of a unified media library to do all this stuff with is still in the future, not only because of this, but many other little issues… It’ll happen one day but it’s how far off that day is vs. buying a consumer desktop, and buying prosumer software for doing some work….
and I’m certainly not going to get involved with that stuff simply because i need to do a little bit of editing once in a while – or in my case, because I want media playback to work properly…
Oh and I also have a PVR built on top of freevo… I just use macosx for that one machine…
Interestingly until recently I used ubuntu as the primary OS, I suppose I’m STILL a hater of freedom though.
Being mainly a Linux/Gnome user (and doing a little development), I don’t see a problem with using Mac OS X (in fact, I’m using it now on my MacBook)… There’s lots of open source software for it and in it, and Apple has been very supportive of the open source community (releasing things like Webkit and Grand Central as open source, hiring the LLVM developers and being one of the driving forces behind the awesome Clang frontend for it, as a couple of examples), and it’s a great development environment.
I’d also like to say, like Duncan did, how appreciative I am of those who are working on Gtk+ for Mac OS X. Having more potential developers and users of Gtk+ is a great thing.
I feel your pain… I get it from both sides, as a GNOME bod and as a Sun employee, with people wanting to know why my main machine is a MacBook Pro running OS X.
One part of the answer is simply that, yes, for better or for worse, being able to use some proprietary Mac software just lets me get my work done more efficiently. I’m more than happy to pay for software whose source code I will never be allowed to see, provided it ultimately makes my life easier.
Running OS X is also the only means by which I can (legally) run every operating system for which Sun writes software (Linux, Solaris, Windows, OS X) on the same machine– even all at the same time if I feel need. And as somebody whose primary focus is on desktop user interfaces, that’s quite a boon. And the fact that it’s Sun’s VirtualBox software that allows me to do so at least helps me to palm off the critics from the Sun side, if not the ones from the GNOME side– especially as VirtualBox uses Qt!
With the same reasoning, Microsoft is an open-source god.
Seriously though, think straight, and stop stupidly falling for good PR.
It never ends, does it?