[ale] Ubuntu and the price of Unity

[Pat Regan]

On Wed, 5 Jan 2011 01:30:37 -0500
Don Lachlan <ale-at-ale.org at unpopularminds.org> wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 11:52 AM, James Sumners
> <james.sumners at gmail.com> wrote:
> > That's precisely my point. GNOME doesn't have to use Unity. The
> > article implies that GNOME has to choose between Shell and Unity.
> > They don't. So there is no reason they should fear that their code
> > no longer belongs to them.
> 
> GNOME *developers* have to choose - do they continue on GNOME or move
> to Unity?
> 
> If Unity becomes "the" desktop, it moves users from the
> free-permanently GNOME to the free-now-but-no-promises Unity. When
> users move, developers move. If the developers go to
> free-now-but-no-promises, that's a loss for everyone.

There's an awful lot of ifs involved in this topic.  If all of this
goes the wrong in every way possible what is to stop the interested
parties from forking Unity if the need arises?

Pat