“Dave Neary published a blog post about some of the challenges
experienced with GNOME and Canonical working together. I’m not
going to put myself in the middle of that particular
tempest-in-a-teapot, but when I got to the point in Dave’s blog
where he justified GNOME not picking up the appindicator work I
cringed and then cringed some more. For you see, the appindicator
story is not so much about GNOME and Canonical as it is about GNOME
and the rest of the free software desktop ecosystem and the
regressive behavior being demonstrated there.“There was a time when most everyone was really trying hard to
close the interoperability gaps between different Free software
stacks, and freedesktop.org was one place to achieve that. People
were engaged in creating improvements for things that weren’t as
good as they should be and sharing the results between projects so
that our users not only got improvements, but got to enjoy those
improvements in all their Free software applications. Those days
seem to be receding into the past however as GNOME seems
increasingly content to “do their own thing”. It’s like they have
lost sight of the goal of a coherent experience for users of Free
software regardless of the applications they choose to use.”