[sham1]

The way the GNOME Project has evolved over the years is just sad. The development ethos seems to be further and further away from the spirit of Free software.

The project does comply with the "letter of the law" when it comes to Free software. That is, the project does give the users their four essential freedoms of running the programs as they wish, freedom to study the programs, redistribute, and modify. But at least IMO this is necessary but not sufficient for "proper" Free software.

At least to me there is still stuff that is required for something to be Free software, even if you technically fulfill the definition. The "spirit of the law" of Free software to complement the "letter of the law". One of these is that you can act in the Free software ecosystem as a productive and good faith actor. In this case, the GNOME Project has decided to unilaterally break the FDO icon theme standard, and for what? Because they want to have the Adwaita icons as a "Private UI icon set for GNOME core apps"? This is not okay.

One must ask if this change truly helps empower the users in their use of the software and their computers.

[cullmann]

Yes, and if they think the spec is bogus and obsolete, fine, either help to improve it or just provide no icon theme that pretends to follow it, then distros know they need to install another one for 3rdparty apps...