This is absolutely absurd on so many levels. There is a thread going around the desktop-devel mailing lists about the GnomeOS. I just don't get the rationale and, frankly, I think the Gnome community is being myopic and shortsighted.
However, I think there might be something more subtle at play here. Redhat. It's well known for some time that Redhat was providing the majority of funding for Gnome either in dollars or people hours. If Redhat could exert their influence over the rather influential Gnome project (Gnome is not known for strong internal leadership nor strong political/business acumen), it could potentially pull of something it has been trying to do for years: hurt Ubuntu.
That being said, it seems Ubuntu has been making the moves necessary to be less dependent on Gnome/GTK. I hate to sound all corporate espionagy but this really feels less about Gnome and more about the corporate players.
And leaving the tinfoil hat realm, if this is all about Gnome and what they want...I feel this is going to be a rough road and they don't have an idea what it really means to build an OS and being responsible for everything: upstream development, apps, drivers, hardware....the list goes on.
The Gnome developers bounce around between companies fairly frequently, and plenty of the Linux-as-primary-platform participants in that thread do not work for Red Hat. I have strong doubts that anyone cares more about Red Hat than they do about making Gnome better.
It hurts Ubuntu like it hurts other downstream distros: more work they have to do to use Gnome bits.
Check the thread on desktop-devel about adding something to control center. The common practice would be to fork something and carry patches, which is work and not something downstreams would be too keen on doing.
Yes, core gnome would still be "available", but it would be more work and harder to get to the interesting bits and break away from the stuff that, frankly, Gnome doesn't do well for which better alternatives exist. Gnome is going monolithic instead of modular, and that is bad for everyone that won't use a stock gnome.
Not that much. Ubuntu of course has its own init system, Upstart, and it's unlikely they'll abandon it for systemd after so much development and integration work. They also have Unity, which fills GNOME-Shell's role. If GNOME-Shell depends on systemd, it will be much harder for Ubuntu users to run GNOME-Shell, but the basic distribution won't be affected.
However, I think there might be something more subtle at play here. Redhat. It's well known for some time that Redhat was providing the majority of funding for Gnome either in dollars or people hours. If Redhat could exert their influence over the rather influential Gnome project (Gnome is not known for strong internal leadership nor strong political/business acumen), it could potentially pull of something it has been trying to do for years: hurt Ubuntu.
That being said, it seems Ubuntu has been making the moves necessary to be less dependent on Gnome/GTK. I hate to sound all corporate espionagy but this really feels less about Gnome and more about the corporate players.
And leaving the tinfoil hat realm, if this is all about Gnome and what they want...I feel this is going to be a rough road and they don't have an idea what it really means to build an OS and being responsible for everything: upstream development, apps, drivers, hardware....the list goes on.