[md8z]

For GNOME I guess you could say it's the same way but they are more after volunteer contributions, not money. So they will make changes that tend to increase the contributions, sometimes it's a trade-off i.e. do we make this change to lose 5 contributors but gain 10 contributors in other areas. They're tough decisions to make, and nobody likes to be the one to tell angry users that their workflow is breaking.

[simion314]

I don't think that the ego dudes do this calculation, just use it to pretend they have a motive.

Since I stopped using GNOME i switched to KDE and a few years back Plasma also had a big ego dude in charge, we had similar issues there with the Plasma vision , one example is

- removing the cachew ugly widget, the dude refused to give us the option to hide it even if we contribute the 3 lines patch ... but guess what the cachew is gone or hidden by default now ... my point is that I have an example that is not GNOME where big ego caused issue and when big ego person left things were solved.

My experience contributing to small KDE project was great though, there was no big vision people that needed to approve a feature or adding a new menu, the maintainers were developers that were happy to help the users, help debugging and were super happy to receive bug fixes and improvements. I would conclude(but without serious evidence) that big projects with big visibility will attract the individuals with big ego, like Plsama or GNOME , the big ego people will be attracted to this very visible projects so they canpush their vision into many peoples faces/lives.

But on the other hand if GNOME can double they contributors at the same time they lose half of the users is a metric they prefer then I hope they got their contributers, though by the number of GNOME forks that appeared it is possible their contributors got fragmented too.

[md8z]

To me it helps to think of it like debt, if they get a lot of money (or contributors or whatever) and lose users in the process then that can be re-invested to acquire more users at a later date. The GNOME forks I have seen don't really have a lot of developers, same thing with the KDE/Qt forks.

I don't really have any other comments on "ego guys", every maintainer has their own style. I have seen leadership with a strong vision work for some projects but not work for others.