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Not to be a "Negative Nancy", but quite a bit speaks against G3's current direction in terms of blog posts and participation.

Especially the latter is easy to verify. Go to their mailinglists and see the level activity, it sure does not look very good. Reading the actual mailinglists gives sometimes a quite disturbing image as well, with a few examples already linked in Mr. Ottes mentioned blog post.

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You can see some decrease in the number of contributors: https://www.ohloh.net/p/gnome/contributors/summary

However, note that the current slide in the numbers is something that only happened after February-March 2012, which was when the previous major release was launched. In 2010 another slide lasted from April until October, so I suppose there is a need to worry if contributions don't pick up around Sep-Oct.

That said, the situation for GNOME is certainly different now, given that they lost their biggest distribution channel in Ubuntu doing their own thing.

The number of commits always pick up before a major release and drop off afterwards. If you try to conclude anything from your analysis, please be a bit thorough!

I thought that was exactly what I said in my comment.

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