This is nonsense.
He was there at the time of the supposed events. If he says it didn't happen then we can take him at his word imho.
> Miguel de Icaza is a Mexican-American programmer, best known for starting the GNOME, Mono, and Xamarin projects.
It isn't like this is some scientist throwing out a fact about nature and needs to give further evidence - Miguel de Icaza's opinion in and of itself was a pretty influential part of the decisions made at the time. He is qualified to know his own opinion.
The article does look like bunk anyway, there were a lot of MS threats around at the time but it was never picked out as a serious part of GNOME's decision making.
Besides the fact that he did not give a reason why GNOME/GNOME 3/Unity happened, he is also still a human being, and thus is subject to bias, deception, forgetfulness, mis-remembering, etc. That's why if you want a real discussion it's useful to have evidence, not just whatever hypothesis sounds good to an in-group.
Miguel started the GNOME project (with, obviously, lots of similar involvement from other people). He is closer to a manager, ie, a person making the decisions. He can just say that the proposed article is nonsense and that is pretty significant evidence.
> he is also still a human being, and thus is subject to bias, deception, forgetfulness, mis-remembering, etc.
Microsoft threatening legal action is not the sort of thing that slips the mind.
> That's why if you want a real discussion it's useful to have evidence
The evidence is Miguel says it is nonsense. You can spill a lot of ink and not come up with anything half as convincing. Miguel's one line is more evidence of why GNOME acted as they did than the entire article managed to scrape together, unless Mr Liam on Linux happens to also be on the GNOME core dev team and I've just never heard of him. But I don't think he was. I doubt he was in the room or involved in any of the decisions.
As for "need", I think depends on what you mean. Is he morally obligated to set the record straight? No, of course not. Will his original reply, with only his username and no other information, convince very many people? Not really: if he actually wants to correct what he sees of as misinformation, he does "need" to do at least a little bit more.
FWIW I certainly don't remember "Avoid being sued over Windows 95 design patents" being part of the motivation for the 2 -> 3 transition being discussed in the wider community at the time. (As opposed, say, to the DCO -- aka "Signed-off-by" discipline -- adopted by the Linux kernel, which was definitely designed to defend against MS-funded SCO nonsense.) But it would certainly make me feel better about Linux desktop fragmentation if it were true.
It was low effort and clearly not in keeping with HN guidelines on what makes a good comment. Even if his comment is correct it is not at all a productive contribution, when an extra 10 seconds to type "I cofounded Gnome, I would know" would fix that. He doesn't need to prove a negative to add to the conversation.
And would he really know the true reasons here? It doesn't look like he was at RedHat, was he actually involved in Gnome 3 development to know the motivations? Again, instead of a 3 word comment it would take literally seconds to have started a much better discussion. Instead this thread is filled with responses derived from the comment's poor quality rather than the actual merit that Miguel's viewpoint would have.
It would have contributed more to the discussion to say nothing than to post 3 words than derail things in this way.
Someone key that was there says "uh, no."
Yes, adding infinite context would make it a little easier to read, but it stands on its own.
No.
That's a pretty poor straw man. As I said, literally seconds would have done it. Heck 3 more words would have done it. "I created Gnome."
Besides which, the article was written by someone who was also around and claims insider knowledge closer in time to the events than when Miguel was involved with Gnome.
It was a low effort comment that did not coincide with HN standards. You can't talk your way around that.
Miguel is hardly enough of a household name, nor does he appear to have been involved with RedHat circa Gnome 3 such that his 3 word low effort comment can stand, with his username, on its own.
He's talking about 2006-2010; during these times he was mostly doing desktop support, it looks like-- occasionally contributing to various online Linux zines. He wrote a similar article in 2013 for The Register. He spent 3 months as a tech writer for Red Hat on JBoss stuff in 2014. Then he did spend 2017-2021 doing tech writer work for SuSe.
> Miguel is hardly enough of a household name
Man... I would have a hard time thinking of more than 4-5 people who were equally prominent in the open source zeitgeist of those years.
> nor does he appear to have been involved with RedHat circa Gnome 3
He certainly was still plugged into the Gnome Foundation and going to the various Gnome meetups, etc, while in a senior role at a Linux vendor doing stuff with Gnome. If there was a problem, I'd think he'd have heard about it.
Was OP?
The TLDR is that nothing was ever said about implied threats to sue, and it was all about "windows/virtual desktops are hard, let's _simplify_ everything!" Also, netbooks/iPhones were all the rage then, so you see where the modal design (for small screens) and giant padding (for touch input) came from in order to accommodate any possible convergence in the future or whatnot.
Because saying so would be an admission of infringing the claimed intellectual property.
If any company had said, then or now, "we did this because we needed something non-infringing" then that would be a statement confirming guilt.