Aug 17, 2007
GNOME Birthday
I really can’t believe GNOME turns 10 years old today. That feels a bit surreal.
I have some very fond memories of the pre-1.0 days of GNOME, most coming from working in the RHAD Labs. A couple GNOME moments that stand out for me are:
First, the very late night when a <cough> “working” version of GNOME was hacked up to show Bob Young the next morning so he wouldn’t change his mind and make us ship KDE with the next Red Hat release(it still had a less-than-stellar license then). Owen even scripted a workflow for that faux-version of GNOME. He might have single-handedly saved GNOME :)
Second, I think back with amusement to the GNOME 1.0 press conference at the first Linux World Expo in San Jose, CA. RMS almost took over the whole show and had the journalists chasing all sorts of non-GNOME crap. Others, mostly Miguel, steered the whole thing back but even afterwards those journalists were wandering around the show floor asking people about this whole “call it GNU/Linux” rant RMS was on instead of thinking about GNOME. Sigh.
But mostly my memories are about the people who worked and still work on GNOME. What an amazingly decent bunch of folks. I am proud to have had some small part.
Happy Birthday GNOME!
Dave, please consider contributing this story to the scrapbook wiki when it opens. :-)
I’ll keep an eye out Jeff – thanks!
BTW, for everyone… I would like to point out that I also have fond memories from the post 1.0 days too – its just my mind tends to drift to those pre days. Nostalgia seems to work that way.