When all you’ve got is a hammer…

I seem to have to bring this up way too much. Perhaps we should have a School House Rock song on how a standard becomes a standard.

Standards arn’t made. They are agreed upon. Forcing standards because “it would solve all of our problems” panders to the idea that we must make everyone happy. That is a sure way to make sure no one is satisfied. Standards should happen because they solve specific problems and solve them well.

Take for example D-Bus. It isn’t a standard but because GNOME and KDE use it extensively it has become a defacto standard. It has taken almost five years (which is fast) to get to that point and we still have a ways to go. The thing about D-Bus is that it never set out to be a standard. There was certainly hope that others would adopt it but its real goal was to be a kick ass desktop communication layer. At some point when we feel it is ready we may suggest it be part of the LSB and perhaps through them go through an ISO process.

Freedesktop.org is not a standards organization. There are a couple of defacto standards that have come out of the project and there are a couple that have failed specifically because they came to fd.o as preconceived standards (i.e. standard by proclamation instead of merit). Fd.o is a place for incubating and discussing possible future standards and experimenting with way out ideas for technology sharing between free desktops (ideas that may never see the light of day).

We must be honest with ourselves when talking about standards. If we rush into them, remove debate, and accept them point blank for some “greater good” then we lose. Standards must be able to stand on their own not as examples of great standards but of examples of great technology. So when talking about why GNOME or KDE should adopt a piece of technology the argument shouldn’t be, “because if they do then we have a standard”, the argument should be, “because it is a great piece of technology that solve a problem in both desktops really well”. The onus is on the project to prove that point.

If my paper to aKademy is accepted I will be going more in depth about this subject while analyzing where collaboration between the two leading desktop projects has been a success and where it has failed. I will also submit it to the next Boston GNOME Summit.

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