[play_ac]

No, that's an outlandish conspiracy theory and completely ahistorical. GTK was always developed on Linux first, and before it was used by GNOME it had a lot of GIMP-specific functionality that didn't extend well to other apps. Want to know why? Because GIMP and GNOME developers were the only ones contributing. Those "diverse desktop environments" almost always took from GNOME and contributed very little back. That's fine to do it but they need to accept that they don't call the shots when they do that. They don't get to pull their funding and then complain someone else is being a bad custodian, it doesn't work like that.

[smoldesu]

> Those "diverse desktop environments" almost always took from GNOME and contributed very little back.

Now that's an ahistorical conspiracy theory. Those diverse desktop environments contributed hugely to GTK, GNOME just didn't use their work or consider it helpful unless it directly related to their desktop... and of course none of that work will relate to their desktop. Nobody is going to fully "kiss the ring" unless they get something out of it, and even back in the GTK3 days it was plainly clear that GNOME didn't care about you if you didn't care about GNOME.

Now, GNOME's "coup" or "killing" of GTK is completely fine by Open Source standards. Even encouraged. I don't stand against the concepts of what they're doing, but they could have done a lot better than fighting third-parties tooth-and-nail. GNOME should be a proud project that leads the GNU movement, and instead it was reduced to a bunch of squabbling supremacists that made their userbase an adversary. I say all that as someone who quite likes modern GTK and writes apps in it.

[play_ac]

>Now that's an ahistorical conspiracy theory

No? Where exactly do you think I've theorized about the existence of a conspiracy? Because I've actually said the exact opposite: there isn't a conspiracy and no one is cooperating at all. There's no evil group of developers secretly planning to sabotage everything. It's just the usual bad communication and planning that happens with a distributed team.

>Those diverse desktop environments contributed hugely to GTK, GNOME just didn't use their work

Can you name what any of these contributions were? Because I've never seen them. I've seen contributions here and there, lots of minor bug fixes, but nothing major.

>Nobody is going to fully "kiss the ring" unless they get something out of it

Avoid this rhetoric please. These open source projects are a volunteer collaboration. No one's kissing any rings or trying to get something out of the maintainers, other than the usual: everyone helps each other write and maintain the code.

>but they could have done a lot better than fighting third-parties tooth-and-nail. GNOME should be a proud project that leads the GNU movement

I really don't know what you're talking about here, but disagreeing about technical things isn't "fighting tooth-and-nail". That's a normal part of any project.

Personally I don't think anyone should care about leading the GNU movement, that's been plagued by petty infighting and drama since the very beginning.