On 20 October 2014 16:16, Owen Taylor <otaylor@redhat.com> wrote:
On Mon, 2014-10-20 at 10:37 -0400, Christian Schaller wrote:
> > From: "Owen Taylor" <otaylor@redhat.com>
> > We can obviously ignore all of this and put a logo onto the top bar
> > anyways case, but it's an unfriendly action towards GNOME on the part of
> > Fedora. And is especially problematical because Fedora *is* seen as very
> > closely associated with GNOME, and at that point it becomes nearly
> > impossible to convince any other distro not to put their logos there as
> > well.
>
> I think calling it an unfriendly action towards GNOME is overstating it.
> Fedora is a separate thing and is not beholden to any of its upstream
> communities, including GNOME. We try to align as much as possible with our
> upstreams because it makes sense, not because having our own ideas
> is by definition hostile towards someone else. To me this is almost the
> same argument that people make about shipping various desktops, that
> somehow not shipping desktop XYZ is somehow 'hostile' towards said
> desktop. It is not, regardless of discussing branding of the desktop we
> ship or which desktop to ship, our choice is about what is right for us
> given our requirements and resources, not about trying to 'hurt' someone
> else.

If we took, say, Inkscape, and patched it to put a Fedora logo in the
middle of the toolbox, it would clearly be seen as poorly representing
Inkscape. If Fedora was the most common way that people obtained and
tried out Inkscape, I'd expect that people working on Inkscape might be
upset - even if the goal of putting the logo there wasn't to provoke the
Inkscape developers. (I said "unfriendly" not "hostile")

There are certainly ways that Fedora branding can be increased in the
desktop which do make sense within the overall desktop design. I'm
interested to see what Mo and Ryan come up with and I'm sure they'll do
a good job. But I think it's important to realize that if we put
constraints onto the end goal - in particular if we require      branding
that is continually visible - then there is an inherent conflict.
 
Speaking as a lowly user my primary reason for using Fedora is that it packages a great GNOME Shell experience that's as close as possible to the design goals of the GNOME team. I think that alone is a good (almost unique) selling-point for Fedora, without Fedora having to add value on top of what GNOME provides. Put another way, I use Fedora to escape distro-specific meddling with the desktop environment.

It seems to me that the GNOME team has put a lot of thought into creating a distraction-free environment to work in, so I agree that compromising those efforts in order to provide persistent branding could be interpreted as 'unfriendly'. Then again, any GNOME folks reaching that conclusion need only review this thread to understand that's not Fedora's intent, and that here we're trying to fulfil a legitimate goal without running rough-shod over upstream's work.

Having said all that, I don't really think that replacing the word "Activities" with a Fedora logo would bad be at all. "Activities" isn't a great term to describe what happens when one clicks there; it's almost impossible to find a single word to describe all that functionality. I suspect that the Window's Start Button is precedent enough for putting the Activities functionality behind a logo instead of a place-holder word, and there's plenty of precedent with other Linux desktop environments, including GNOME 2.

Realistically it seems that the login screen, wallpaper and Activities corner are the only practical options. There's plenty of room on the login screen for a logo, and to my mind adding one wouldn't detrimentally affect the user-experience. I haven't taken the time to understand the legal implications of having a logo on the wallpaper, but it does seem like a logical thing to do and surely legal restrictions can be dealt with...? If the Activities corner logo was implemented as a Shell extension then objectors could remove it and Shell need not be patched to provide the logo.

To be honest I don't really understand what all the fuss is about.

--
"Racing turtles, the grapefruit is winning..."