| That's a pretty arbitrary yet general accusation that I'd find hard to believe about any group of people. Surely there are both arrogant and non-arrogant people in any community, GNOME included. From my time contributing to GNOME (in the 2.x series), I haven't found many arrogant people at all, but times have changed, surely, and I don't know who gets attracted to work on GNOME today. I also find your use of "well known designers" to be a signal that there's some arrogance you (or those other designers) might have displayed. Most of the "well known designers" are unable to accept the reality that heavily translated software needs to support a button "Cancel" that may turn into 100 characters in a translation (I am exaggerating a bit, but some things can turn shorter and others can turn massively longer in a good translation — good design should accommodate both and not require translation to become worse). Not sure how often you were involved in running a popular free software project, but "drive-by opinions" are in abundance. GNOME has long prided itself on being a meritocracy, where merit to GNOME is what's valued. Jony Ive would not get extra points if he wasn't investing enough time into GNOME proper to give him a holistic view of the platform. But the most important part of GNOME being a meritocracy is that you need to convince developers of a need to redesign something, not other designers: GNOME is not a company, it's a collection of individuals sharing _some_ goals. I am guessing whatever opinions were shared were also shared without backing studies or user testing showing significant improvement in the UX without regression in other parts. |