[boudewijnrempt]

All this wibbling about GNOME 3 and so on -- it's just not relevant to the data in the original article. The same thing happened to KDE at the time.

The reason is simple: Nokia. Nokia (and to a much lesser extent, Intel) built up a lot for Maemo and Meego. Just for KOffice/Calligra, at least twenty people were paid to work on the documents application. For all of Maemo/Meego, the total number of people Nokia funded was enormous.

And then Elop, and the burning platform, and Windows, and well, that was 2012.

By 2014, my company was dead, amongst others, and, yeah, the peak had peaked, and the big chance for free software had gone.

[ginko]

That explains KDE's decline (Nokia owned Qt), but not Gnome.

[boudewijnrempt]

Yes, it does, because Nokia had its fingers in both bowls of porridge, to the extent where people like Michael Meeks were fighting really hard to keep a small library like kcalendar out of Maemo.

Nokia started with GTK and when they went to Qt, they never stopped their involvement with GTK/GNOME -- they seemed to have expected the idiots in both camps to just work together for the good of free software, and like the idiots we were, we didn't.

Good grief, the painful conversations we had after the Dublin MeeGo conf ended, between people from both camps...

I was there; I wrote code; I had employees, I went to the various conferences and trade shows. My company provided one of the default apps on the N9...

[girvo]

My Nokia N9 is still the greatest phone UI I’ve ever used. I wish Microsoft hadn’t killed Nokia.

[oblio]

Or you know, the general decline of desktops from "the only computing" to "secondary computing after mobile".

[boudewijnrempt]

No... It really just is the sudden drop of investment by Nokia and Intel. All those extra contributors were hires working on Maemo and Meego.