The future of development on the Linux desktop is being debated and deliberated on the weblogs of key developers this week.

If you are interested in computing platform decisions and open source software, then you may be interested in the debate. However, even if you are not at all interested in these things, it may be interesting in a more abstract sense.

On a campus in Redmond, Washington, smart and talented people are deciding what your computer is going to be like in the next decade. Here, in a parallel universe of sorts, smart and talented people are debating an alternative future for desktop computing — and you can read every word it.

Havoc Pennington, a Gnome hacker from RedHat, Miguel de Icaza, a founder of the Gnome project and Ximian, Robert Love, a kernel hacker with Ximian, and many others are batting around the posible platform options for linux desktop development. It’s strangely empowering to witness.

The debate and dialog continues and can be followed on Planet Gnome, an aggregated weblog of Gnome developer weblogs.

Mailing lists have generally been the primary communication method of open source developers. While mailing lists are still the core of the communication, weblogs have started to play an interesting role. They are especially effective for high-profile debate and dialog like this. Unlike a public mailing list, the signal-to-noise ratio is high.