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Comment by baybal2 | Hacker News Reader

> If you are a developer and you don't agree with direction changes, you don't have to work on them

I would tell the same to Poettering, Clasen, and co.

There is really nobody who obligates them to work on their "innovations" in GNOME with religious zeal if the rest of the project showed no interest, speaking lightly.

If nobody wants to work on their stuff, they can't claim "victimhood" as if that happens as a result of somebody's ill intents.

I have to reference Torvalds vs. SystemD here as an example how Sievers, Poettering, and co. instantly drew up a picture of kernel community being some kind of a bullying ring when the only thing they did to them was to ignore their (bad quality) patches.

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I would advise holding off judgement on specific individuals unless you have worked with them closely and you have a deep understanding of why certain decisions were made.

Again, if you are a developer and you disagree with someone's choices, you are free to take it in your own direction. You do not have to work on anybody else's stuff if you don't want.

> if you are a developer and you disagree with someone's choices, you are free to take it in your own direction.

That would be best said to persons named above.

They were free to fork GNOME into their touchscreen based imaginary future, and experiment with it even more freely as a minority group, rather than trying to hijack the project, and getting stalled half-way because of popular pushback.

>trying to hijack the project, and getting stalled half-way because of popular pushback

Again, please do not spread these unfounded conspiracy theories. I can explain more what I mean by this, but it seems unlikely you are willing to hear what I have to say. I can tell you if you're trying to convince me to be hostile towards any specific developers for any specific project, I will have to decline to get involved with that. You don't have to resort to character assassination, if you have some ideas on a good technical direction for a project, just make the argument and write the code: people will listen if your arguments are sound and your code works.

It's not a conspiracy theory.

GNOME 2 was a project of 100+ developers.

TOPAZ was a half-baked tablet UI tech demo from a dozen Red Hat employed devs, later dropping to 7-9 regularly active ones.

Tell me what is more to explain about this?

I personally don't know the full history; you might consider looking for some old blog posts or politely contacting a GNOME developer for an explanation of the history. From what I understand, the run up to mobile was a major source of funding for GNOME 2 from several mobile companies, and that's where all the developers came from, but most of those companies were not able to keep up and failed to iOS/Android. So the funding dried up and Red Hat was one of the few companies that happened to survive because of their other business. That's what I've heard but you should talk to more people who were actually involved in the project back then if you want a more complete answer. (Please assume good faith and don't be hostile, we're all friends here, these are just developers trying to pay the bills like the rest of us)

There was a story recently, On the Graying of Gnome, comment by boudewijnrempt [1]:

> The reason is simple: Nokia. Nokia (and to a much lesser extent, Intel) built up a lot for Maemo and Meego. Just for KOffice/Calligra, at least twenty people were paid to work on the documents application. For all of Maemo/Meego, the total number of people Nokia funded was enormous.

> And then Elop, and the burning platform, and Windows, and well, that was 2012.

> By 2014, my company was dead, amongst others, and, yeah, the peak had peaked, and the big chance for free software had gone.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25489580

Thank you, I figured there was a blog or comment somewhere with more info.

GNOME 2 was forked as MATE, but there is no funding for 100+ developers working on it.

> I would advise holding off judgement on specific individuals unless you have worked with them closely and you have a deep understanding of why certain decisions were made.

Is this advice meant to be applied against all people, or just other developers? I certainly wouldn't apply this standard to RIAA lawyers suing kids. I judge them to be worms even though I never worked with them. And don't even get me started on politicians, I've never worked with one but I certainly feel entitled to have harsh opinions about some of them.

If the advice is limited in scope to professional peers, then I have to disagree with it; having double standards for people like yourself isn't great advice.

For me, it applies to everyone. I try hard to not hold a grudge. It's difficult but emotionally rewarding.

If we are trying to be good open source citizens and avoid unnecessary fights, you can apply it just to that.

I just want to say that what you said here and in your other comments in this thread resonated with me in how you approached dissecting issues like ones that have been discussed here. I wish there were more people like you and it's a characteristic I hope I can be more like as well.

I respect that you are willing to admit you don't know the full history and implore others to understand why for example, certain decisions were made. It seems as if many people love to theorize about what these are, making correlations which are usually driven more by their feelings than reality.

I feel like character assassination was a phrase that I feel aptly describes how I've seen a lot of people treat people like Lennart Poettering. I feel as if some people are unable to separate person from their opinions. Not considering that person like they are more likely to do so if they were in person.

I sometimes feel like this attitude is more strongly felt by some people in a community where there is freedom to take a project in another direction if they desired (I know that not everyone has this option).

I do think however that the article of this thread expresses their opinion on an issue in a way that it explains how it effects them without resorting to emotional attacks towards the project and it's something I really liked about reading it.

I think people believe Linux is community driven project, while in reality it is strongly corporate backed. Just look at kernel contributions [1]. I think same applies to most of the infrastructure, someone works on FreeType, Cairo, Pango, etc.

In such case disjoint between users and developers is even further. I am professional developer, yet I have zero contributions to my framework and just a few contributions to libraries. After 10 years my contributions to Linux community limited to bug reports, few patches and manuals.

In reality there is not enough community support to maintain existing systems. "Freedom to take a project in another direction if they desired" by individual is overrated, that's TempleOS.

EDITED: Some bragging about making a difference

There are a lot of projects with less corporate influence. No systemd on BSD, but hardware support is not as good. Generic distributions is something that works for most of the users. There are a lot of niche distributions and projects (Void Linux runit!). Current state is just a reflection of users priorities.

[1] https://news.itsfoss.com/huawei-kernel-contribution/

Sorry if it was not clear, by take it in another direction I generally mean find funding, get hired by someone else to work on it, or start another company to work on it if there is enough of a business opportunity there. It's very hard to make significant changes to a large codebase without a team of people.

I just don't want our community to turn to conspiracy theorizing and conjecture. We can do better.

> Is this advice meant to be applied against all people, or just other developers? I certainly wouldn't apply this standard to RIAA lawyers suing kids. I judge them to be worms even though I never worked with them. And don't even get me started on politicians

These developers do not wield power over anyone and they are not filing lawsuits. They are developing code, either as their job, or as volunteers. And in either case, contributing their work as open source.

It might help to take a little perspective before publicly passing judgement on _individuals_ and what you imagine their intentions to be rather than merely judging the merit of their contributions. Those are completely different things.

What I'm talking about really has nothing to do with power. Maybe the examples I chose suggested that power dynamics are relevant to my point, but I think they aren't, so here is another example without one: Should an architect refrain from judging Frank Lloyd Wright just because they never worked together? I think certainly not. That seems completely backwards to me. Anybody is entitled to have an opinion on Frank Lloyd Wright, another architect particularly so.

Are you talking about judging his contributions and significance to architecture or his worth as a person?

I get that the two things have some overlap and aren't cleanly divisible. What we do is a major part of who we are.

But I mean, it's one thing to say "I think it [his architecture] is awful", or even "I think his architecture had a negative impact on people/society/cherished values/whatever" but quite another to say "I think he sought the ruination of everything good and decent because he was a demented and feeble mind." Because, yes, I do think the last one would only be appropriate if you actually knew something about the guy...

Edit: And yeah, of course, I'm not trying to censor anyone's opinions. Of course you can _have_ the opinion, you can even express it. I just think that it's not what engaging in productive/civil discourse looks like and, depending on the venue, people may call that out or whatever.

I am not talking about judging his 'worth as a person'; rather his 'worth as a developer.' Maybe in his private life he's a wonderful person, who knows? Who cares? It is his professional activities that concern people.

You are of course welcome to have an opinion, and to choose whatever product you want based on that opinion. But if the extent of your opinion is "this person is a jerk and their work is terrible and not to my taste" that is unlikely to convince that person to change course, especially if they don't know you and if the decision is already made.

Furthermore, the "this person is a jerk" part is clearly not part of some dispassionate evaluation of his professional accomplishments and is just a verbal attack couched in the language of professional criticism.

I suspect that, in many instances, people who do that are not trying to convince anybody of anything. If they expected to be greeted everywhere with agreement then they would not go around saying things which they know perfectly well are not likely to result in a vigorous and healthy debate if they were said to strangers in the street :)

This advice definitely applies to open source developers whose work is out completely in the open.

You can literally take millions of lines of code that they may have written wholesale, and change a single word in it that you don’t like.

In open source, they have nowhere to hide. If you disagree with a certain decision they have made, you are welcome to take the effort they have put in to implement the hundreds and thousands of other decisions they have made that you do agree with, with a simple “git clone”.

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