ITWire

Prior to this post, senior kernel developer Alan Cox responded to another part of De Icaza's post which ran this way: "The second dimension to the problem is that no two Linux distributions agreed on which core components the system should use."

"That made me laugh," Cox wrote on Ramkrishna's G+ page. "There was KDE and Miguel then came along and created the very confusion he's ranting about. He was also core to ramming CORBA down peoples throats which then had to be extracted slowly back out of the resulting mess that blighted Gnome 2.x and occupied vast amounts of developer time.

"He's dead right about the way the Gnome people keep breaking their compatibility every (sic) time not just with the apps but with the UI, with the config (which is still worse now than in Gnome 1.x !) and so on.

"However it's not an Open Source disease its certain projects like Gnome disease - my 3.6rc kernel will still run a Rogue binary built in 1992. X is back compatible to apps far older than Linux.

"As for his ranting about the audio I blame Lennart Poettering... - the kernel audio hasn't broken compatibility, it even has OSS compat layers back to the beginning of Linux audio support. Actually blaming Pulseaudio is mean too (but it's fun blaming Lennart and that's what he exists for) - it also has compat stuff designed to make ancient apps just work...

"Gnome isn't really a desktop anyway - it's a research project."

De Icaza made a couple of posts on Ramkrishna's page, reiterating the views in his blog post.