halting problem :: Prologue

:: ~7 min read

GNOME is made by people, and people make history: complicated, recurring, funny, sad, and everything in between; this is my attempt at compiling an history of the GNOME project to provide a better context not just of past decisions, but also of its future directions

Prologue

History is one of my passions; more than offering a narrative of the past, it gives us context, and with context comes a better understanding of the people that made history, and of their choices.

This is true for every human endeavour, and so it’s also true of software projects.

Free and Open Source Software is a social and political movement before a techological one; as such, the history of a free software project should help us contextualise not just the technological decisions, but the personalities, the goals, and the constraintsthat influenced those decisions.

It’s often the case, especially in the field of software development, that newcomers to a specific project, or a subset of a project, end up facing some code that does not work; or that barely works, some of the time. The immediate reaction is typically trying to understand that code, that technology, that whole stack, in order to fix it, or replace it. Just learning what the code does in that specific instant, though, gives only a partial picture of how that code, that technology, that whole stack came into being.

It’s said that programmers think that bad code comes from bad programmers; in reality, bad code often comes from good people operating under different constraints than ours. Understanding those constraints, and how they changed over time, is the first step in understanding how to write better code.

This is especially true of projects that involve hundreds of developers, operating under wildly variable constraints, for decades.

Projects like GNOME.

GNOME is a free software project that aims to create an environment for computer users that is

  • easy to use
  • accessible for everyone
  • under a license that allows everyone to modify and contribute to it

As far as free and open source software projects go, it’s fairly old; it’s old enough to vote, and to buy a drink in the US. GNOME, as a community, attracts not only volunteer contributions, but commercial ones as well, and it provides the technological underpinnings for both volunteer and commercially driven products. It is a recognised brand, for better or worse, and it comes with opinionated decisions, as well as an ethos that not only drives the individuals that make it, but also the ones that use it.

More importantly, GNOME comes with a varied history, and a lot of baggage, deeply rooted in the choices made by thousands of people. It’s something that newcomers to the project often deal with by asking questions to whoever appears to be knowledgeable — but it’s not something that the the project itself offers.

So, I wanted to work on recontextualising GNOME.

Why me, though?

My history with GNOME does not date as far back as the project’s origins. I did start using Linux in 1997, around the time GNOME was created, but for the first couple of years I mostly used the VT for emails, IRC, Usenet, and the occasional Napster download (kids, ask your parents); a GUI was something I used to launch Netscape Navigator. I experimented with KDE, but I ended up settling on WindowMaker, because I enjoyed the non-Windows-y look of the desktop.

As a user, I switched to GNOME full time by the tail end of 1.x series, and went through the 2.0 transition with a stronger interest in the direction of the project — to the point that I started contributing to it.

GNOME is the reason I became a passionate believer not just in the freedom of releasing the source code of your work, but also in the necessity of a working environment for the people using a server, a workstation, a laptop, or even a phone. I learned principles of software development; architecture; security; privacy; hardware enablement; design and user experience; quality assurance and testing; accessibility. I got my first job through GNOME, and I met wonderful people that I consider friends, peers, and inspirations. I lived through a huge chunk of the history of the GNOME project, and in some cases I can kid myself into thinking I helped shape that history. This does not make me the most neutral or dispassionate person to lend his perspective on GNOME, but you’ll have to make do with me, I guess.

In the beginning this was to be a presentation, but Jonathan Blandford did an amazing keynote on the history of GNOME in Manchester, at GUADEC 2017, for the 20th anniversary of the project, where he went through most of the milestones and events of the previous three decades. I realised, at that point, that it would take somebody like me, who’s less talented than Jonathan, much more than an hour to do the same, let alone go through GNOME’s history in depth.

I started writing a series of blog posts, but halfway through I realised I was using the same kind of voice I use when writing presentation notes, which is when I realised I should probably just read them. Thus, a podcast.

So, let’s lay down some of the ground rules for this.

The first question is: who is this podcast for?

When I write, I have three broad categories of people that I want to reach; the first is composed by people that are new, or relatively new, to the GNOME project, and want to add more context to the history of the project and of the community they just joined. In a large, established project like GNOME, there’s a lot of insider information that you typically have to suss out in person, or that you end up gleaning if you hang out in the social channels long enough. Why is using flags in a UI such a problem? Why are settings expensive? What’s up with the clocks? There is a lot of established knowledge that is only evident by its final results, but context for those results is missing. It’s already hard to get started in a new community, so this podcast aims at lowering the curve for newcomers at least a bit.

The second audience is made by people that are not familiar with the GNOME project outside of having heard about it; they are familiar enough with Linux, but lack the “insider baseball” aspect of both the community and the technology. They may know that GNOME is a desktop environment, but have no idea what a desktop environment is made of.

The third audience is the GNOME developers themselves; people that have been embedded in the community long enough to know some, or many, of the ins and outs of the decisions made in the past, but they may be unfamiliar with the whole history of the project. I hope they’ll forgive me for going on tangents, espcially at the beginning.

The podcast is divided in chapters, roughly corresponding with each major version of the desktop. There will be one episode per week, with breaks between chapters. I’m not the fastest, nor the most adept at this medium, so I want to allow some leeway to maintain both quality and quantity.

Each episode will go through events in the history of the GNOME project, but I’ll try to take some time to expand on the context in the Free Software world, as well as the rest of the happenings around the same time.

In some cases, I may have to give some technological definition, mostly to ensure that we have a common vocabolary, especially for people who are not heavily invested in the stack itself, or for people that learned English as a second language.

The primary sources for this podcast are public mailing list archives; additionally, I’ll refer to blogs from GNOME developers, as well as other public sources, like interviews and presentations given at conferences. As I said earlier, I do have direct experience of a chunk of the GNOME timeline, but I’ll try my best to stick to public sources for the events that involved me as well; this is not a “tell-all” kind of podcast. Using only public sources has the advantage that I can refer to specific information, but has the downside that I might miss some of the backstory; I don’t want to create an oral history of the project, as that would be its own endeavour. I’m sure people involved in some of the events will have their own version, and I’ll gladly accept corrections.

Each episode will have a companion article, which will contain the script and the sources I’ve used.

Hopefully, this podcast will be interesting for both newcomers to the GNOME project, and for old timers as well. Looking back to what happened helps us shape what’s to come; and having a better understanding of the past can give us confirmation of our choices, or a chance to revisit them.

Finally, I wanted to have an excuse to say out loud, with apologies to Mike Duncan:

Hello, and welcome to the history of GNOME.

References

history of gnome gnome podcast

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