[Openicc] Fedora CM, was: Google Summer of Code . . .

[Alexandre Prokoudine]

On 5/19/10, Chris Murphy wrote:

>> On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 9:30 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
>>> So this is the ignorant person's question, which is more of a culture
>>> question,
>>> maybe even a licensing one: is it not possible for distributions to agree
>>> on
>>> some extremely basic things, and get them in place in more than one
>>> distribution?
>>
>> It's about desktops, not distributions. Mind you, D-BUS is crossdesktop.
>
> I don't understand the distinction, or the example.

Ah, right -- you are coming with Mac background.

Linux has different desktop environments, each of them having its own
set of basic and advanced applications (PIM, document/image viewers,
file manager and so on). They also use different UI toolkits and,
mostly, different APIs. You can have several desktop environments
installed on your system simultaneously and even use applications from
one desktop environment in the other environment. GNOME Color Manager
relies on some APIs from GNOME desktop environment (gnome.org).

Desktop environments are not written by one single company that does a
particular distribution. This is an open work, so e.g. both Redhat
(Fedora) and Canonical (Ubuntu),as  well as smaller companies and
(lots and lots of) individuals  contribute to development GNOME.

Now, a distribution is just a bundle of easily installed applications
that covers needs of a user that creator of that distribution had in
mind. It can contain applications that are written for GNOME and/or
for KDE (kde.org) or not written for any particular desktop
environment at all (like OpenOffice.org and Firefox).

Alexandre