3 karma · joined November 12, 2021
Claiming I'm evil for thinking that Gnome has a well deserved bad reputation among a lot of developers, misrepresenting what I say, and just responding with far far too many diverging arguments for me to ever address any of them. This is not okay.
That's not what I said, I said that there were several developers paid full time to work on Gnome. Mostly they're being paid for by other companies, companies like redhat.
>This is also incorrect. There was one year they brought in that much, and it was because of Handshake,
We seem to be disagreeing on public facts. In 2018 they brought in $1,073,797, in 2019 they brought in $915,646 and in 2020 the brought in $925,189.
For the past 3 years they've brought in nearly a million dollars in revenue.
If you're going to claim I'm wrong on such a basic and verifiable fact I don't really think we have enough common ground to have any sort of discussion, we're just living in different realities.
You also seem to be really misunderstanding what I'm saying, in the least charitable way possible. You're making a lot of very negative assumptions about not a lot of text, like claiming that I think a bunch of students should get a bad reputation because they worked on Gnome, which is just so out there that I don't understand how you'd reach that conclusion from what I've written.
Since we can't seem to communicate I don't see any point in continuing this, certainly if we did it would need a lot more structured of a format than this.
You can feel free to email me, it's $MYUSERNAME@gmail.com. If you want me to change my behavior, well fine I'll listen, but try to keep your criticism focused so that I can actually address it.
I hear this a lot, but Gnome is a foundation with at least a few developers paid to work on it full time. They bring in almost one million in "revenue" per year, and have a lot of sponsorships and the like. In 2020 they paid out $645,243 USD in employee compensation.
That puts in firmly in small-company scale.
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My basic tenant is that when you make choices that make it difficult for developers to work with you, when you fail to cooperate and compromise, then you're going to suffer reputation damage. Reputational damage has all kinds of effects, one of which is that in situations like these people are going to look at what you say with a bit more skepticism. Another is that you're going to get people recommending against using your project.
Now you may mean something very specific when you say "bad faith". What I say when I mean it is that you should be aware that Gnome developers probably won't be open to collaborating on anything unless it directly benefits the Gnome project in a pretty major way.
>And I think what you've said is really dangerous
That's a very strong claim considering what I said was "When does it become reasonable to assume bad faith?".
For example, I do believe that the switch to libadwaita is going to make things more difficult for people building apps on GTK4, because I think that they're going to move more and more important functionality into it and leave GTK4 to more or less waste away. I suspect that we're going to see a lot of stuff that could have easily been part of GTK4 become part of libadwaita instead, and that's going to make things measurable more difficult for everyone making GTK based desktop environments.
That's a prediction about the future, and if I'm right then I'd say that Gnome is acting is bad-faith, considering their current statements on the issue say libadwaita is going to change very little for those people dependent on GTK4.
>"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
It seems to me that that is setting the standards of discourse for people on the platform, and isn't intended to apply to large businesses, even if those large businesses mostly get their money from sponsorship and donations.
>You are talking about making people suffer for something that you acknowledge is just an assumption.
I think suffer is a bit of an exaggeration, I'm talking about warning people that a particular platform is user-hostile. Gnome (the organization) has a long history of behavior that I find unpleasant, and expecting me not to tell people about that or to pretend it didn't happen is asking far too much. Gnome is responsible for Gnome's bad reputation, maybe that's something they can fix though if they fix the behavior that's causing this bad reputation. It's the whole "freedom of speech, not freedom from consequences" thing all over again. Gnome can make whatever bad decisions they want, but they don't get to be free from criticism for those decisions.