I'm always a bit amused when there's something that looks like a thread on Planet GNOME and the current one about decadence and more generally where GNOME is going (let's link to Mikkel's post with links to most of the relevant posts) is not an exception. Since it's a topic close to my heart and I've been thinking a lot about this, it's a bit different from other threads, though. I waited a few days before writing this post and I'm still not convinced it's the right time to reply for various reasons that I won't elaborate here (well, except one: still working with some great people on expressing our opinion in a understandable way).
I just want to make a point for now: if you think about GNOME as a set of applications (or, say, a desktop), then you will always end up with people disagreeing on what should go in and where the project should go. And it seems quite some people think that not reaching an agreement is bad. But is it really bad? Maybe it'd be better to accept that different people actually want different things because GNOME is used in really different ways -- a trivial example now is the standard desktop vs the internet tablet. We've put ourselves in a situation where we mostly define GNOME as a desktop and the desktop is a list of modules. This is a dead-end. Don't get me wrong: it's working quite well and we can continue like this for some time, but in the end, this is denying the GNOME stamp to many things that our community is working on.
So where do we go from here? I think it's time to stop redirecting people to ToPaZ and start planning the future. And planning the future means redefining what we do and the process we're using.
Oh, and make sure to follow what Lucas writes on this topic. It seems we're sharing a brain, or that he's my evil twin, or something like this.
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