"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."
That's true but then you are talking about Red Hat or some other company, not GNOME. GNOME itself is not a company nor is it synonymous with Red Hat. This is a common source of confusion that I see, if you want to criticize some actions of Red Hat then you can just do that, no need to turn it into an unrelated discussion about GNOME.
"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. ... 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."
No, we are not disagreeing on public facts. I mentioned this, those were because of one time donations. The number in 2021 and in 2017 is much less. Please re-read my comment, thanks, I can re-state what I said if you want. I can also provide additional public sources for this if you don't believe me, just ask. Edit: Also, another thing I want to say is that even if that were a regular thing, a million dollars a year is still a really piddling amount for a US-based non-profit. That is enough to hire a maximum of like 10 full time staff. From what I have heard from the foundation, they don't have nearly enough money to do much besides the bare minimum, if they had more money to hire developers then that would probably go further towards getting some of the long-standing issues fixed that the member companies are not incentivized to fix.
"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."
Sorry, let me make it perfectly clear. I am assuming good faith, I don't think that's what you meant about those students, nor am I reaching the conclusion you've suggested. But my point is that what you are saying can unintentionally cause damage to them, and so that's why I'm asking you to stop. If you think this is a stretch, well, it's not, I have seen some newer contributors that were very upset by the various negative comments on social media, when they did nothing to deserve that level of vitriol.
I don't really have any interest to pull this conversation off Hacker News, there is nothing more along those lines that I can say here that hasn't already been said. Again please re-read my comment. Also please understand that when you lead the conversation by suggesting that it's ok to assume bad faith, and saying you think people deserve to suffer reputational damage, that's not really a good incentive for me at least to want to reach out to you professionally. I talked about this before but to me that is the worst possible motivator. Can we please discuss technical stuff? Why is it so hard to do this? If you want to continue then please just put aside your conceptions of what you think other people have done that bothered you, I'm sympathetic to your frustration but those people are not here. You are talking to me, not them. If you really just want to vent, that's fine, but this is not the place to do it, and I am not the right person who can listen to that. Whatever your beef is with someone, I hope you can resolve that, but please don't make other people guilty by association.