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Comment by tspiteri | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure GNOME is becoming a Linux-only project, but if it were, I wouldn't see anything wrong with that. I think it is somehow similar to the window manager issue from a few years ago, where some people wanted GNOME to support lots of different window managers, which meant they had to work around the quirks in each of them, or limit the functionality to the lowest common denominator.

Sometimes, an issue in the desktop environment needs some deep digging for proper fixing. Having to dig deep into each of the supported platforms is daunting and will probably lead to a worse user experience. So I think they should just pick their platform and work on it.

Nobody expects Apple, for example, to support the Mac OS X UI on different kernels/platforms, even though Darwin is very Unix-like. Apple actually go one further and only support their own hardware. Why can't GNOME focus like Apple does?

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Because GNOME is supposed to be an open, not closed system. At least that's how I've always seen it.

P.S. Since I got 2 downvotes, could someone please explain me what's wrong with writing a personal opinion?

I'm not sure I understand you. How is focusing your own work on the one platform you care about the same as being closed? Everything is still open, and if a platform wants to support GNOME, they are free to do the work themselves; I'm sure patches would be accepted.

Being limited to only one operating system would make it more closed.

P.S. Quoting from Wikipedia: "Open systems are computer systems that provide some combination of interoperability, _portability_, and open software standards." [1]

Also the name GNOME is an acronym of GNU Network Object Model Environment. It refers to GNOME’s original intention of creating a distributed object framework similar to Microsoft's OLE. [2] If GNOME is considered an open system despite working only on Linux, the same could be said about OLE, but I doubt many would agree with this.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_system_%28computing%29

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME#Name

For me 'open' has a very strong connection to 'choice'.

"Open" is about accessibility to the development process and result products. It's not about conforming to the broadest possible "port" base.

Frankly, if there's something that Gnome needs (or just can get significant value from) that is available on Linux but not other platforms, I see nothing wrong with abandoning those other platforms until/unless they catch up. That's just progress.

That said, I don't see any evidence that this is actually happening. The systemd proposal was just that (a proposal), and while systemd is a pretty invasive change to linux boot and daemon management it really doesn't seem like something that couldn't be abstracted by FreeBSD in a way that would work with Gnome.

You're being downvoted for redefining "open", which in this case is understood to mean open source. http://www.opensource.org/osd.html

I understood exactly what he meant when he said open system.

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