On my flight over to GUADEC, the airline showed the cinematic masterpiece that is Big Momma’s House 2. Which I did not watch, except that every now and then I would look up, and get sucked in by the TV screen for a minute, in that way that tends to happen with TV screens, even when you can’t hear the sound and have no idea what’s going on, and if you did know what was going on you’d think it was stupid.

So one of these times I looked up, our hero was seated at someone else’s computer, and even before he pulls out the flash drive, you just know that this is going to be one of those classic movie cliché extremely tense file I/O scenes that script writers seem to love so much, along with focal retrograde amnesia, identical cousins, precocious eight-year-olds who single-handedly solve their divorced parents’ love life problems, and other such things that only exist in movies and TV.

But this extremely tense file I/O scene was different… the computer was running GNOME.

At first I thought I was just imagining it; that it was really Windows and I was just seeing GNOME becuase that’s what I’m used to. But then I noticed the GNU icon in the panel…

But the best part is, when he goes to copy the files, and the clichéed dialog comes up, with the gigantic bright red progress bar crawling glacially across the screen as our hero wonders if he’ll be able to finish in time, it’s a GNOME dialog. Someone actually took the time to write a one-off custom gtk app to do a cheesy progress dialog for a cheesy sequel to a cheesy movie starring Martin Lawrence and some guy who looks like the “Dude, you’re getting a Dell” guy, but apparently isn’t.

And so now I’m thinking… there’s an opportunity here. Hollywood doesn’t want to show computers running Windows, because then they have to pay (or at least negotiate with) Microsoft. Enter Linux (stage left).

All we need to do is add a --ridiculous-movie-cliché flag to zenity, so that instead of getting nice HIG-compliant warning, progress, etc, dialogs, you get blinking 96-point fonts and other assorted melodrama. It’ll be brilliant. It will revolutionize movie making. This time, Ryan Phillipe will be presenting the award to Miguel, instead of the other way around.

John Gruber writes on why Apple won’t open source its apps:

The role these apps play isn’t just to make Mac OS X look good compared to Windows or Linux, but also to help make each new version of Mac OS X look better than the previous one; i.e. to convince Mac users that it’s worth paying for the latest upgrade.

Hold that up to a mirror and I think it explains exactly why we should give up on the idea of “GNOME 3.0”. We don’t have the “I needed the money” excuse that proprietary software companies do, so why would we want to hold back new features rather than letting our users get them as they become available? And if we just let the new features trickle out one by one, then how can we ever call it 3.0?