Sorry to distract to a sideline of this conversation but the Gnome thing is a symptom of a wider problem in the GNU/Linux world at this moment.
There is a war going on, a pityful money grabbing one packaged as an idiological one.
Simple said, Canonical and Red Hat are both undermining the GPL by changing the progammable environment into extreme complex beasts so that all others (not backed by lots of r&d money and lawyers) lose entrance to the material wheter it is GPL or not does not matter anymore, the entrance is too high.
They do it under a guise of having idiological Issues with each other, one backing Gnome and the other Unity.
Recently even the Kernel developers got caught into this mess, having Linus calling some maintainer of UDEV a lier.
Google UDEV and systemd to see the whole gory mess, and mind my words, this is only the beginning of the troubles in GNU/Linux land.