[PommeDeTerre]

It's "alive" in the sense that there's still some activity going on, but it's shedding users, and it's becoming irrelevant.

I liken it to XFree86. While it may have been very popular and widely-used at one point, it didn't take long at all for users and developers to flee once things started looking bad.

People just haven't been happy with GNOME 3. That's a fact. And with no improvements visible on the horizon, more and more people are moving to MATE (and a few to Cinnamon).

GNOME can't survive in its current form if people and developers continue to leave it in favor of better desktop environments.

[sciurus]

Compare the amount of GNOME developers discussing GNOME development at http://planet.gnome.org/ to the number of MATE developers discussing MATE development at http://planet.mate-desktop.org/