[TriLUG] Who runs Red Hat and KDE

Matt Wilson msw at redhat.com
Tue May 27 00:30:00 EDT 2003


On Mon, May 26, 2003 at 07:00:21AM -0400, Ilan Volow wrote:
>
> In the end, I'm really past the point of flaming in regards to
> distributions like Red Hat making unusable software. They will keep
> doing the same stupid things again, and again, and again. I can't
> stop them from doing that crap in their own distribution, but if
> they think for one second that I am going to let them target the
> desktop and terrorize Aunt Tillie without a fight, they are very
> much mistaken. Flaming is redundant if you're close to all-out war.

We've been working on HCI standards which transcend the specific
widget set used for a particular application.  Just because a program
uses Qt or GTK+ does not mean that they should behave differently.  We
do our best to make software that behaves consistently with documented
style guides and best practices.  We cannot modify every open source
application that we currently ship to be consistent.

This leads to having preferred applications for certain tasks.  It
also brings about criticism that we don't include enough applications,
or hide someone's personal favorite down in a "More Applications"
sub-menu.

> I'm writing a public license that enforces usability and, among
> other things, bars distributions such as Red Hat who refuse to make
> usable software but who target the desktop anyways from distributing
> or modifying the code, or copying any successful or unique UI
> designs.

I think that further work on various style guides, and even a
generally accepted toolkit-agnostic standard, would be more useful.

Cheers,

Matt
msw at redhat.com
--
Matt Wilson
Manager, Base Operating Systems
Red Hat, Inc.



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