I appreciate that in the heat of the moment, you want to correct the record quickly; but this adds very little to the discussion. I look forward to your longer comment / blog post setting the record straight.
I hadn't read the username and took the comment as a typical low effort HN troll but coming from Miguel, "This is nonsense" is a complete statement that stands on its own.
"Famous person who worked on the project disagrees and does not explain why" does not meaningfully contribute to a discussion. We're left to throw random hypotheses at a wall with no evidence.
He did explain why - he thinks the linked article is nonsense. What more could he write?
It isn't like this is some scientist throwing out a fact about nature and needs to give further evidence - Miguel de Icaza's opinion in and of itself was a pretty influential part of the decisions made at the time. He is qualified to know his own opinion.
The article does look like bunk anyway, there were a lot of MS threats around at the time but it was never picked out as a serious part of GNOME's decision making.
If I ask "Why do birds fly south for the winter?", and an ornithologist just says "Well it's not what your friend said!" and walks away, that is not a reason why birds fly south for the winter. It doesn't help anyone understand the subject. But because the ornithologist is an authority figure, people take that as an explanation. People will then chatter among themselves and decide that whatever the group thinks must be true.
Besides the fact that he did not give a reason why GNOME/GNOME 3/Unity happened, he is also still a human being, and thus is subject to bias, deception, forgetfulness, mis-remembering, etc. That's why if you want a real discussion it's useful to have evidence, not just whatever hypothesis sounds good to an in-group.
Why should someone have to look at a username, bio, or life outside of HN to evaluate an HN comment's quality?
It was low effort and clearly not in keeping with HN guidelines on what makes a good comment. Even if his comment is correct it is not at all a productive contribution, when an extra 10 seconds to type "I cofounded Gnome, I would know" would fix that. He doesn't need to prove a negative to add to the conversation.
And would he really know the true reasons here? It doesn't look like he was at RedHat, was he actually involved in Gnome 3 development to know the motivations? Again, instead of a 3 word comment it would take literally seconds to have started a much better discussion. Instead this thread is filled with responses derived from the comment's poor quality rather than the actual merit that Miguel's viewpoint would have.
It would have contributed more to the discussion to say nothing than to post 3 words than derail things in this way.
Source article made assertions that saber-rattling drove divergence between Linux desktops, as opposed to the popular narrative of divergence we've heard-- and offers no evidence, but only nebulous assertions.
Someone key that was there says "uh, no."
Yes, adding infinite context would make it a little easier to read, but it stands on its own.
That's a pretty poor straw man. As I said, literally seconds would have done it. Heck 3 more words would have done it. "I created Gnome."
Besides which, the article was written by someone who was also around and claims insider knowledge closer in time to the events than when Miguel was involved with Gnome.
It was a low effort comment that did not coincide with HN standards. You can't talk your way around that.
Miguel is hardly enough of a household name, nor does he appear to have been involved with RedHat circa Gnome 3 such that his 3 word low effort comment can stand, with his username, on its own.
> Besides which, the article was written by someone who was also around and claims insider knowledge closer in time to the events than when Miguel was involved with Gnome.
He's talking about 2006-2010; during these times he was mostly doing desktop support, it looks like-- occasionally contributing to various online Linux zines. He wrote a similar article in 2013 for The Register. He spent 3 months as a tech writer for Red Hat on JBoss stuff in 2014. Then he did spend 2017-2021 doing tech writer work for SuSe.
> Miguel is hardly enough of a household name
Man... I would have a hard time thinking of more than 4-5 people who were equally prominent in the open source zeitgeist of those years.
> nor does he appear to have been involved with RedHat circa Gnome 3
He certainly was still plugged into the Gnome Foundation and going to the various Gnome meetups, etc, while in a senior role at a Linux vendor doing stuff with Gnome. If there was a problem, I'd think he'd have heard about it.
> And would he really know the true reasons here? It doesn't look like he was at RedHat, was he actually involved in Gnome 3 development to know the motivations?
OP was at SUSE when they made an agreement with MS touching on this issue. I don't agree with the OP, I think if there was specific pressure of this sort it wouldn't really be a secret or subject to speculation. My point in all of this is simply that the GGP 3 word comment without anything else is not defensible as a constructive comment.
Well even the information contained in your post and the reply ("I am the founder of GNOME, and [something about his official connection to the project during the 2 -> 3 transition]; I can assert that nothing like what was described here happened: No patent lawsuit was threatened; fear of such lawsuit did not play into our decision to develop GNOME 3; and Ubuntu did not start Unity because they were rebuffed from GNOME 3") would be adding to the discussion.
As for "need", I think depends on what you mean. Is he morally obligated to set the record straight? No, of course not. Will his original reply, with only his username and no other information, convince very many people? Not really: if he actually wants to correct what he sees of as misinformation, he does "need" to do at least a little bit more.
FWIW I certainly don't remember "Avoid being sued over Windows 95 design patents" being part of the motivation for the 2 -> 3 transition being discussed in the wider community at the time. (As opposed, say, to the DCO -- aka "Signed-off-by" discipline -- adopted by the Linux kernel, which was definitely designed to defend against MS-funded SCO nonsense.) But it would certainly make me feel better about Linux desktop fragmentation if it were true.
No idea; that's why I put something in brackets to be filled in. If he wasn't working on GNOME, then it moves his authority from "I was directly involved in the decisions" to "My colleagues were directly involved in the decisions"; still strong, but not quite as strong as the former.
The TLDR is that nothing was ever said about implied threats to sue, and it was all about "windows/virtual desktops are hard, let's _simplify_ everything!" Also, netbooks/iPhones were all the rage then, so you see where the modal design (for small screens) and giant padding (for touch input) came from in order to accommodate any possible convergence in the future or whatnot.
I think it's largely sarcasm. That is, the part about Microsoft threatening to sue over patent violations is probably true, but I think the op is implying that granting the patents was ridiculous.
I have no particular desire to defend Microsoft, but anyone who was around at the time and has an intact memory can tell you that this is not true. Citation very much needed here.