Questioning corporate involvement in GNOME development (2014)

"The GNOME project has clearly struggled in recent years; the proliferation of GNOME forks and ongoing criticism of the project's core decisions make that clear."

"But it has not been demonstrated that some sort of corporate agenda is behind these problems; it is not in Red Hat's interest, for example, to cause users to flee from its flagship desktop environment."

"If corporate desires have truly 'trumped what anyone else wants/needs', it should be possible to point out specific examples where this trumping has happened, but such examples are not (yet) on offer."

What, if anything, can FLOSS communities do to prevent corporate interests from overriding community interests?

> ... the proliferation of GNOME forks and ongoing criticism of the project's core decisions make that clear.

And yet, how many among the major distributions are defaulting to any of these forks?

I see where the criticism is coming from. Let's not kid ourselves: what Emily Gonyer calls the "GNOME community", is just a very loud minority. Red Hat does indeed put their own interests first, like any other company, but they have an actual paying user base, who I would dare say is even larger in numbers than those supporting Gonyer.