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Comment by awrmc | Hacker News Reader

It's not easy for me to take this comment seriously because gnome doesn't actually have anything anyone could define as leadership. It's a decentralized open source thing. You might be incorrectly assuming bad faith.

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GNOME has a foundation[0] that is responsible handling their funding as well as setting goals/standards for their desktop. As a matter of fact, they're the most well-funded desktop environment in the entire Linux desktop landscape. I think criticism is fair, especially when it pertains to removing features and working against the community using funding that is, in large part, raised by said community.

[0] https://foundation.gnome.org/

That isn't how gnome works, being decentralized and all. The foundation pays for very little of the development and has little to no influence over what developers actually do. If you wanted the community to have more influence over development, the way to do that would actually be to get more money for the foundation so they can afford to hire more developers from the community. Right now, they don't employ any. The funding they have now is actually shockingly small for a nonprofit based in the USA, and almost unnoticeable compared to what a tech company based in the USA would have.

Removal of features would still happen though because that's a natural part of any software project responding to the ever-shifting priorities of a large group of users.

Every semi persistent grouping of individuals has leadership even if informal and redhat and the gnome foundation have defined leadership structures.

But that's the whole thing. Redhat and the foundation don't have any leadership over a decentralized group of open source developers. Gnome is not like the Linux kernel where there's one giant repository with one lead maintainer serving as a bottleneck. There are individuals who hold more influence but that's more because a lot of other volunteers chose to follow them, not because they seized power from anybody.

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