I'm afraid you're going to see this happening in just about every other project as well. KDE is doing the same things as we are. You might consider me an apologist but I do admit when things are wrong in the project, but since you're overall bitching about the entire concept, I don't think we'll ever see eye to eye on this. In any case, sorry GNOME didn't work out for you. I hope you continue to use Linux desktops though.

Hah. :) They get away a lot easier than us, GNOME guys. Everbody bitches about what's gone, but not what we've added or improved. I'm sure it will be the same for KDE 5.0.

You can replace firefox with GNOME 3, and it wlll be the same comments.

You ask good questions. Karen Sandler answers to the Board of Directors. So ultimately, we are her boss. So the buck doesn't stop with the executive director. She acts on the whim of the Board. That's not to say that Karen is completely blameless, but in general, we make the decisions. The situation really consisted of having a situation where it took a long time to collect payments. In fact, so long that the financial controller fell hopelessly behind and just took a long time to remit payments. We were aware of the situation but because the financial accounts were only readable by one person the financial controller, oversight proved to be difficult so the Directors were caught off guard when investigation proved the problem was worse than it was. The situation can be fixed by better processes, better oversight by having at least one board member being able to review the accounts, better oversight of the financial controller to make sure that they have all they need to do the work and don't fall behind. The OPW program also expanded by 20% so while it was managable at one point it grew past the limits of our current processes.

We will be working on lifting the ban on finances sometime next week. So we are in good shape now. But, the experience has taught the board some valuable lessons. (who is mostly a new board with new members)

The OPW program was born because we wanted to increase diversity in our project. It was GNOME only at one point, and suddenly others thought it was a good idea so the program expanded. It could have spun off into its own program, but we get a lot of recognition for running the program and we want to take credit for it. Our adboard members are delighted with the program and is a big positive in continuing to invest in GNOME. So that's why. It's not particular part of the mission of building a free and open desktop but it does provide us resources to do it while diversifying our community. In general, OPW has good for us and we gain some prestige by running it.

Thanks for your questions,

We all do. In fact we have to. The linux desktop isn't big, and we need as many developers to make interesting and useful apps as much as we can. We need to attract people to the platform. Otherwise, OSes like ChromeOS or some desktop based on Android will just take over.

Forking happens. It doesn't mean it is a completely bad thing. Mate provides the old experience so most of us are pretty happy about that. They are an independent project and they will make their own way in the world. But all of them depend on GNOME technologies. If we tits up, then they have to take up the burden of maintaining the upstream. Nobody wants that. That takes focus off their main goal of writing a desktop. I have already sent both Mate and ElementaryOS mail inviting them to GUADEC and encouraging them to write papers and be part of our eco-system. We will of course are interested in what they have to say and even interested in whatever widgets they want to write for GTK+ or might want us to write widgets to support their goals.

Somewhere around this thread, I talked about OPW and diversity. Diversity works for GNOME and their forks too. You can't assume the people doing the forks would have invested their time in GNOME in the first place. If it ends up that we have more people who want to do a different version but are still interested in using our upstream libraries, that is still a win in my opinion. GNOME should be a big tent. The more people who use our software the more stable and useful it will be for everyone. Converting to looking at GNOME as a product has taught us some things.

Thank you for the kind words. You're not an ass, you're interested in GNOME in your own way. The idea of engagement is hopefully to listen and also correct misunderstandings and sometimes repeatedly state what the goal is and what the mission is. There is always a pressure to status quo, and maybe it is a risk to do something different. But to not try would be a crime. If we fail, we fail. But already projects like ElementaryOS and others are also working on design focused, high quality desktops. I feel encouraged that others also see the value of writing desktop software this way.

The folks on lwn are developers. People like ebassi don't have the tolerance when they see what their opinion as bullshit. They write the software and of course are emotionally close to it than I am. I don't write the software. I focus on people. The only way to change people's mind or how your project is represented is to be patient, polite, and most importantly respectful. Most people like yourself at least will appreciate that. To be honest, every time I see comments like yours it makes engaging people worthwhile. So I should thank you. :-) Not all of us are bad people and all of us have good intentions. There are things we could do better, and I'm working on doing just that especially in the people department. :-) Others in the project are finally realizing that as well. We're not the same project when we started GNOME 3! Cheers.

If something feels wrong to you, then please file a bug. Participation is the best way to fix things. Bugs are looked at.

It doesn't work that way. Developers especially of big applications need a consistent default fault and default look to design their applications. Applications like Microsoft Office or Photoshop rely on the defaults in order to properly design the look. They can't however design for people who change their fonts. They certainly won't feel responsible if it doesn't look good. That's why there is a fixed way of having fonts. If the fonts don't look good as a default we should fix the fonts, or fixed the rendering engine, or the display server, wherever the problem is. You can still change your fonts in GNU/Linux, but it doesn't need to be in the main GUI. Now, if we are not fixing the fonts in a timely manner or something then yeah, you should have the power to change them.

Some was like that I agree, but a lot of others ways to cover up bad behavior. I've been kicking around Unix as a whole since 1985. I sent my first email in 1984. I have worked with Unix systems since I was 19 years old. I went through all the cool stuff. I've been part of the GNOME project since 1997. It's great that you can customize your environment, it's what makes using GNU/Linux great because you have that choice. I know the attitude, the computer is a creative extension of yourself. I did a lot of that. But these days, I tend to just focus on the stuff I really want to do. Not mess around too much with the desktop. You shouldn't be touching it either once you've locked in your workflow. But you always end up doing so because something doesn't *quite* work the way you want, or some new feature come in and you want to play around some. I've spent more time on .Xresources than I care to recall. Let me ask, did you ever think about changing your font in OSX or in Windows?

To sum up, things are different when you're working on something as a product, a consumer level product. Before, GNU/Linux desktops were just a collection of components put together without any relationship between them. You slap some changeable theme and then call it good. There is no attempt to make consistency. We never took something that wasn't some rehash of Windows XP and make it our own, with a consistent user interface. While you might focus on your use model, GNOME methodology is very healthy for the Linux eco-system because we try to fix these problems up and down to stack. If you want to have reliable bluetooth connections, you go to the Linux bluetooth matainer to work out good user space tools that interact with his or her kernel drivers. I'm working with the powertop guys to come up with a great way to tune a system so that it doesn't use as much power. If you have that attitude, you understand what's really important and the chaanges you make affect everything like ripples in the water. It was GNOME that pioneered the fact that you can put in a cd into a cdrom and have something pop up. Why? Because we felt that it needs to be 'just work'. That's why there is a /sys for devices and udev because userspace wanted them. Demanding that things just work puts pressure on everyone to make things better.

If it was just about having a panel, icons, and a bunch of other stuff, hell we were done 18 years ago with fvwm2 or fvwm95. It was all there. One thing you should realize that you're trying to force GNOME into status quo, there are so many projects that act similiarly and look similarly. It's not healthy. GNOME needs to do what motivates it. It might leave some behind, but others will join as well.

If I were to have some criticism, we spend too much time working up and down the stack and not enough on our developer experience. KDE is light years ahead with a nice SDK kit. We need to do what KDE does there. It's easy to write a KDE or QT app. We need to do the same. This round, that is going to be a focus because there is no point having a beautiful desktop for normal folks if we can't give them the apps they want. For that we need a lot of app developers.

All which use GNOME technologies. Mate is moving to GTK3, so they'll be using all our libraries they'll just do a different design than shell. Cinnamon is not using shell, but they are using GTK+ and other bits. Unity will use GNOME technologies until they finally port to QT.

Heh. Yeah, slashdot has never been a friendly forum for GNOME and likely never will be.

Sure, it's a management problem, and you're right we weren't equipped to execute it. We've learned and now we're fixing it. Some things are not always discoverable. The issue is a little more complex than that. But ultimately, we are to blame, yes.

We are starting up a QA team that hopefully will at least check to make sure that extensions work. The other thing is working on some automated integration testing. We have a continuous integration server already, so we are definitely improving quality of testing and releases.

The reason some things are removed is a little complex. Some features are removed because it doesn't fit the product design as it was conceived. Other times it's removed so that it can be re-implemented at a later time in a way that is improved or makes better sense. Other times, it could just be that the mintainer who removed it could have been completely asinine about it. It happens. What makes it hard is that a lot of this happens in a real product, but in a Free Software project, you see all the dirty details and half steps because it is after all being done in the open. So, yeah, a lot of times the desktop looks incomplete.

One good model to follow and that's hard to do, is to keep the old GNOME 2 around until about 5-6 releases of GNOME 3 and then switch over. The reason this is hard is that someone has to maintain the old stuff and around that time a lot of support for GNOME had kind of dried up because we had a lot of companies like Nokia, Sun, and others who had contributed not just money but people as well. When they went away, it was harder to jump. This is the primary problem, because GNOME 2 wasa also incomplete, once it was more or less complete everybody enjoyed the experience.

:-) Some days more than others!

Sure.. what's the point of an engagement team if there is no engagement?