So. Someone made some stats about GNOME and it turns out that some people are very angry and some people are defensive and others are angrily defensive and many are indifferent (but I’ve not seen any angry indifference yet, although Mr Stedfast’s post comes close).

I work for Canonical, so it’s hard for me to pretend I have no bias in this. I’ve been a GNOME user for much longer, but I’ve not contributed to the project in any meaningful sense, mainly because I’m a sysadmin who codes some rubbish in his spare time. Therefore you might wish to largely ignore anything I say.

I have a myriad of reactions to this, all of them my own and just as subjective as anyone else’s, but there’s one that I think is at least novel in amongst the discussion I’ve seen so far…

Where do we go from here?

Is it the case that the angry people will only ever be happy if the defensive people hire tons of engineers with a job description of “go hack cool GNOME stuff, but only within GNOME’s processes/domain”? If so, how many is enough? (Note that I am a lowly sysadmin, this does not constitute anything close to a committment to doing anything, I cannot speak on behalf of those who sign my paycheques, I speak only for myself ;)

Or is it the case that better dialogue and understanding between the angry people and the defensive people will lead to a broader appreciation of the different roles that different organisations (and the forgotten individuals who make up the majority of code owners in GNOME) bring to the table in this great game we call the Linux desktop? If so, who should be having that dialogue and why aren’t they doing it already?

Or is it the case that the angry people are actually angry about something more fundamental and should actually turn their anger on their own paymasters for paying them to make a cool desktop, but not then taking it to the masses in any meaningful sense?

Or is it the case that this is The Internet and you can barely open a web page without someone shoving a thundering firehose of bile into your face, and we should all do our best to just get on doing the awesome things we do and be happy that we are alive and happy?

I’m certainly going to do the last one no matter what happens, but I think it would generally be more useful for people to be talking about solutions than arguing about who is the most or least evil. I’m not a GNOME member/contributor/founder/boardmember or otherwise invested party, I just use it, so my words are irrelevant :)

Please enjoy your day :)