As any software project grows in size and complexity its need for sustaining revenue grows. You scale or you die.
Open source is not immune to this fact.
This fact forces projects to do things they don't want to do. Projects that fail to adapt fail. They deserve to fail. Think of it as evolution in action.
And so we come to GNOME, which is starting to have FAIL written all over it as the result of Canonical's decisions to replace the GNOME shell with its own Unity program, and then to withdraw financial support by disabling the Banshee Store by default.
(Lots more people know this Travelocity gnome than the GNOME project. This fact speaks volumes.)
Canonical has struggled to define a desktop market for Linux over a decade. It has flailed and failed. Yet it needs money as much as the next company. It has to make decisions that will allow it to survive on the market it has, knowing that the days of the desktop have gone and mobile Linux belongs to Google, through Chrome and Android.
In some ways the whole GNOME play is a kubuki, not meaning what it claims to mean, then, because Ubuntu is becoming a server Linux. It is literally retreating into its shell. The whole idea of a desktop interface, a Linux directly competitive with the Windows desktop, now seems quaint.
You won't learn that from reading the Linux “experts” now trying to analyze all this. They're asking questions about open source “citizenship” , wondering if there was anything GNOME could have done to save the situation.
The simple answer is no. To succeed in a big market you have to be scaled. Canonical was never scaled to succeed in the desktop market. Economic exigencies don't need a political analysis. They are what they are.
Google is scaled. Google can compete in a huge market, one defined by hundreds-of-millions of units, not just millions.
Canonical has a future on the desktop, in its support for minority languages, in niches. It is not going to be and never has been a mainstream company. And it can't afford to drag politically-oriented open source projects in its wake while it pretends different.
Sometimes the truth is just that simple, and just that cruel.
