I’m sure the developers are more than fine to get constructive critic. But there’s so much “Oh, this is Lennart Poettering’s project – must be piece of crap”, “OMG! Ubuntu said they are going to remove support for templates in Nautilus – GNOME is crap!” kind of critic going on which unfortunately doesn’t help anyone.

why do you “normally” give it FUD?

Doesn’t matter if you have a contract or not, if you pay for the product or not, if the code is free or commercial. Open source and commercial have exactly the same responsibilities towards their users. You can criticize and be negative to any project, open or close source, no matter if the developers get paid or are working for free.

They say programming is art, so by definition it can be and should be criticized, with no excuses, it’s not about the money. And the worst criticism is by not using the product.

You’re using an older Vala version probably or they have updated Geary (I haven’t tried since then). I will give a second shot later today.

Alex:

I looked over my geary compile and I didn’t have any issues with vala, or gnome keyring, just the one extremely annoying problem with libgee.
Sorry I couldn’t help.

I don’t know numbers well enough to say where they should contribute more. To me it looks they are working at the moment quite a lot on top GNOME layers. Where do you think they should contribute more?

GNOME would require people to start work on various core applications at the moment. Let’s see if Rhythmbox developers wants to be involved with ‘Music’ and Yourba guys with ‘Photos’. I doubt that, but let see.

I would like to see Canonical to take bigger role on GNOME but somehow it doesn’t seem to happen. I guess they are out of engineers already and investigating some more to GNOME is impossible at the moment. Unfortunately working and concentrating on Ubuntu technologies doesn’t help others that much (excellent work on touch screen, etc. for sure).

Sometimes it feels funny that Linux desktop is so dependent on Red Hat and still Fedora/Red Hat gets so much turd on them. People seems to think software comes from nowhere and don’t appreciate the work the developers are doing.

If you look at the Ohloh statistics again and ignore the 3 people working almost exclusively on GStreamer and the 2 working on translations, you get 10 Red Hat employees and 5 others. (The 2nd page looks like 6 Red Hat employees versus 8 others with 6 translators/documenters.) This gives the GNOME project essentially a bus factor of 1…”

http://blogs.gnome.org/otte/2012/07/27/staring-into-the-abyss/
https://www.ohloh.net/p/gnome/contributors?query=&sort=commits_12_mo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

Frankly, I deploy Ubuntu servers because they’re incredibly easy compared to Fedora or CentOS servers. Sometimes they take literally minutes to set up, and automation is much easier and faster. I don’t know if that’s an RPM vs APT issue, or whatever, but frankly I don’t care.

I can’t say if Red Hat contributes a lot or very less to Linux desktop technologies but at least the list of their work is quite impressive:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Red_Hat_contributions
They have very talented engineers working on full scale of Linux technologies – desktops included.

Calling GNOME as a Red Hat project would be underestimating and insulting to other companies and people who are working on the project. GUADEC showed nice again that GNOME is all but just a Red Hat’s project.