Let me explain. I say it doesn’t make any difference because:
The point of the whole discussion is not the shape of the background, but only the fact that the background exists and it’s applied forcibly
Changing the radius of this shape it’s a poor choice for differentiate and won’t create enough distance from Suru.
We don’t really want to take the distance from Suru. We will go either upstream or Suru.
The original objection was more “ethical”. It was “how” we are conducting this transition, more than if we are legally allowed. It’s an annoying move, IMO, because @jaggers’s right, once you release your work with some permissions, you should not moan if someone takes them, and sure you should not feel in the right to do it, however I see some good reasons behind it (other than the fear to see their effort be partially obscured by a distro that is huge). As @frederik-f said, there is no right and wrong (for us at least) only a decision whether we should follow a more communitarian approach or take our way.
I like @frederik-f proposal, we have awesome symbolic and folders icons and we (at least the part of us that has design arrows in its quiver) will try to speak our voice in the GNOME effort.
I am all for applying the background forcibly to any app icon, for that background would differentiate Ubuntu from other distros.
You can take a square and add the curved corners to it, and that squircle would be, then Ubuntu’s, not some “squircle” developer outside Ubuntu.
If that squircle is Ubuntu’s own, no outside squircle developer would cry about how the squircle is used by Ubuntu, and/or disown the Yaru team and its work.
It is a question of independence of Ubuntu, as it has always been. There was no outside icon/squircle developer crying, and this thread would’ve never been.
Hopefully a lot has been lost in translation there. Sam says in his post that “Ubuntu is claiming to have such an application platform in Snap”.
But if not, that’s an example of the weird “upstream” fixation I referred to above. As far as I can tell, “GNOME vendor” is not a real thing except in World of Warcraft. That aside, the argument amounts to “Ubuntu should be sticking with upstream merely because it’s ‘upstream’, not for any reason that actually matters to users”.
Right. Gnome designers do a lot of valuable work. But they have a luxury that Ubuntu doesn’t have: they are not accountable to thousands of app developers and millions of users. This gives them the freedom to take a highly principled approach to minimalism, for example, or design a shell that is optimised for their simple “core apps” and not for thousands of third-party apps.
Ubuntu, with a much broader user base, needs to take a broader view: catering for use cases like launching apps quickly (Dash to Dock), or seeing whether anyone messaged you on Slack while you were at lunch (app-indicator menus), or even something as simple as the satisfaction of recognising Ubuntu when you see someone using it on TV (a custom theme).
I’m just a user for many years in personal use and in my company, for me it’s very important the visual identification that I’m using Ubuntu and not every other distro.
If i wanted a “pure” gnome I’ll go yo Fedora.
I haven’t really been involved in Yaru for a long time, so this is my opinion and mine only.
Yaru is clearly loved by many people, including me. The Yaru team is doing a great job and that needs to be said as much as possible.
The way the Yaru team does it is amazing. I still can’t understand how they keep up. The fact that Canonical trusts Yaru enough to literally make it the face of Ubuntu is an incredible complement and shows “design-by-community” works. Sam might not like this approach, but he should judge Yaru on the result, not the approach.
I think the Yaru team is doing their best to work with Gnome, to contribute back upstream and to take into account “what Gnome wants”. However, Ubuntu will never be a “Gnome distribution” or “Gnome OS”. Working together requires effort from both sides to align better. I have seen much effort from the Yaru team to do that; the vision of Gnome is taken into account in many discussions. However, I have not seen such willingness from the Gnome side. I interpret Sam’s post as “I want X and I am frustrated that you are not doing that”. This is not a good basis for collaboration.
Does Sam want Gnome and Yaru to work together? Or is he only interested in more people to implement the Gnome designs?
Anyway, I applaud the efforts of the Yaru team to work together with the Gnome team. I’m all for more collaboration, even if it remains one-sided. I just want Gnome to be more open to new ideas and participate more in the discussions of the Yaru team.
I’ve got an email reply from Sam to this post but I didn’t get explicit permission to paste the response to the forum so I won’t (I got explicit permission to pass on details from the previous email I posted), so I’ll be a little more coded, but the general idea, though, is that yes, Sam doesn’t like it when people just fork projects rather than collaborate, from what I can tell. He dislikes the fact that Yaru simply forked (as he puts it) rather than tried to collaborate first (he had high standards for icon inclusion and feels like we’re cutting corners for the sake of completeness, he doesn’t like that low quality), but also dislikes how someone before was contributing to the Paper icons project and then simply forked it and stopped contributing back to his(?) Paper project.
Anyway, this difference of opinion will likely persist and explaining myself repeatedly is exhausting, so moving on so everyone can be more productive would be great–I’m already very busy in my limited FOSS contribution time. Also, encourage folks to reach out to me directly themselves instead of this quasi-gossiping in forums that would be preferred, this whole sending me forum snippets isn’t productive.
Does he want us to ‘move on’ in disagreement with himself and GNOME, then?! Does he not want us to agree with him after all?! I suppose if that’s how he wants it then that’s how he wants it… just… frustrating (I know it’s time consuming, as he says, but he talks about these issues as though they matter to him, but not enough for him to want to conume all his FOSS contribution time, which is understandable). But there you go, perhaps the Yaru devs can engage with him directly if they care about what he has to say and want reconciliation. I know some don’t think that’s necessary but I wonder if more friction and animosity will occur if this isn’t resolved, I just don’t think it’s ideal that, as a GNOME distribution, we’re disagreeing with GNOME and GNOME (when Sam is speaking on their behalf) don’t seem comfortable with that (which makes me uncomfortable that Yaru is in disagreement).
In any case, I suppose that’s the end of me trying to make communication happen by proxy. I’m glad that Yaru is in email conversation with other GNOME developers in any case so perhaps my intervention wasn’t necessary.
By the way, Sam says that he appreciates @frederik-f trying to upstream some Yaru changes into the default so well done on that Frederik and keep at it!
…he had high standards for icon inclusion and feels like we’re cutting corners for the sake of completeness, he doesn’t like that low quality…
No one in our team is an icon designer so yes, we simply picked up the pieces as best we could to move the project along. What alternatives did we have when the maintainer only “collaborates” a few times a year.
IMHO we should close this thread. Nothing good comes from us discussing this anymore.
I’d agree because Sam no longer wants to engage on this in the way I was attempting (and didn’t really in the first place, like I said, I possibly just made things worse, but wanted some sort of reconciliation if it were possible) @ian-weisser
He’s working under the wrong licence then! Creative Commons Share-Alike encourages people to take your work and use it in their own projects. That’s the whole point.
Also: under this licence, by forking, you are collaborating. You’re contributing to the same body of assets that people (including upstream) can use in their projects, because the licence requires derivative works to be released under the same terms. So, if someone builds on your work and makes something you actually like, you can just reach out and grab it and use it yourself. It goes both ways if you want it. If snwh had actually liked any of our icons, he could have just taken them and put them in his icon set.
With a Creative Commons project, people should only have to collaborate if they want to, because they share your aims and principles. Otherwise, they can help themselves to your assets and use them in their own projects. If that’s bad, then honestly, he’s releasing his work under the wrong licence. It’s the whole point of Creative Commons, lol. There are other licensing terms that give creative control.
To be fair, that’s a predictable consequence of starting a public debate with a blog post, instead of sending a PM!
I am communicating with tbernard and jimmac because of what we can contribute to adwaita and they are really handsome people (ofc we also talked about the upstream drama). If he can give us his telegram handle we can surely do so! Mine is… https://t.me/Feichtmeier
But I agree with Mads that this thread starts to bite in its own tail.
I don’t think Sam Hewitt needs an advocate here to talk about his thinking, etc. If he can’t respond, we should consider the matter as closed.
The Yaru team is an efficient group, so it can create its own “squircle.” And, squircles are all over the Internet. A square and a circle cannot be copyrighted, and placing one over other with different transparencies or deleting few also cannot be copyrighted.
What’s needed is (for Ubuntu) is to create just one folder icon and few smaller images (symbols) to put over it to distinguish between Documents, Downloads etc. And, one icon for the Desktop, which is not there in Gnome. As “Desktop” is a user folder, it doesn’t have to be created at all, enough to put a symbol depicting that folder over the folder icon. Yaru icons > places and status folders. And creating that “squircle” background to go under any other (app developers’) icons.
Thanks @ads20000 for taking time to report @snwh’s replies. I prefer taking only one thing from this story, that he’s frustrated because he wanted the project to follow a different direction, all the rest looks just childish.
