[whichdokta]

If Greg had started his post with a question along the lines of:

  "Dear Mark, what can GNOME do to help 
   Canonical integrate your  work & devs 
   with upstream?"

Rather than:

  "*omfgroflcopter* you Canonical dudes 
   are all like soooo lame and have never
   done anything for GNOME"

...then maybe his post would have translated to a measurable improvement in my reality.

As it stands all he's created is a distraction from getting code written.

sigh

[CodeMage]

I've often wondered what it would be like to work on Open Source projects and contribute to something like that, but I've never done it before. This post piqued my interest, so I read it and followed the links and read the comments and, in general, spent more than an hour on reading the discussion.

Which leads me to my question: is this normal, widespread behavior in Open Source? I'm honestly interested in answers, because, frankly, to me this looked like a boatload of politics. I get enough of that at work.

[whichdokta]

Is normal, widespread behavior for humans when we are not getting what we want I think!

One practice is to be more conscious of when we're not getting what we want and pay extra special attention to how we're reacting to others as a result.

Greg says he wants Canonical to contribute more to upstream.

Mark probably wanted Greg to not badmouth Canonical.

Now neither party are getting what they want so the question is can everyone pay enough attention to their reactions to avoid a full-blown civil war?

Oy vey.

[randallsquared]

Is normal, widespread behavior for humans when we are not getting what we want I think!

Or in pathological cases, even when we are. :(

[davidw]

It depends on the project. They all have different flavors. And of course if you create a project, you can set the tone.

[zaph0d]

No, but shit happens.

Update: Added Forrest Gump wisdom.

[jolan]

Canonical also ships KDE/XFCE derivatives. I don't hear those camps whinging on about this.

Canonical packages the Linux kernel along with other F/OSS software and ships an ISO and some updated packages. It's not their responsibility to make other people's wishes come true.