Mon 2 May 2005
I have long held the philosophy that things don’t become useful until they are no longer exciting. The wow factor is great at getting people interested and hyped up about something but that is just a product of our five minute attention span culture (is it still that long?) After that time is up, the hype is gone, the dust has settled and real work starts getting done. I mean D-Bus is hyped to no end but really all it is is a more useful than we already have communications channel. Some day people will wake up and realize it is a really boring piece of technology. And that is when it becomes really useful; when it is just used to get work done. Sure my hacking on the python bindings was loads of fun for me but that just means it is not being used yet. As soon as bug reports come streaming in and I spend most of my time fixing mundane little errors instead of adding fun features, then I can say my work has become useful.
In that respect Gnome has become mature and for the most part each release is just polishing up the last. Sure there is still some major changes going on in the infrastructure but for the most part it is all there to support the work of where the excitement has moved to. That is applications. There is some really cool work going on in the application space and there needs to be more. While most of it is pretty useless the potential for these applications make them the exciting place to be. The next generation of hackers shouldn’t worry about infrastructure as much (though we do need people who are interested in this level to keep things flowing). I’ve always been burried in infrastructure that I have never been able to get my pet project, a multimedia authoring tool once called The Snagglepuss Project and now called Center Stage, off the ground. Too many times I just got stuck dealing with infrastructure and these days that is where most of my time is spent.
I think a good balance of boring, enhance the infrastructure work combined with a dose of exciting what can we do with that infrastructure work will make sure that Gnome stays the mature desktop that it is while allowing it to remain exciting to newcomers. I don’t think chucking the infrastructure and moving to Gnome 3.0 will gain us much other than a lot of people enaged in exciting new infrastructure work. I for one think that that work should go on in the applications layer and the infrastructure should be adapted as we go. But that may just be me and my silly philosophies.
