... but ultimately, in the case of GNOME, i am not particularly worried by flame-wars. GNOME is sick - very sick - and its developers should give up before they too become too sick to continue living decent lives.

halcy0n - yup. there are areas where project developers focus on "their thing" - forgetting that there are other projects out there, forgetting that they are part of a larger picture.

to date, those things which have been forgotten are, that i can recall:

* samba, wine, freedce all are non-interoperable multi-hundred-thousand-line projects which essentially do the same thing: DCE/RPC.

* those crack-heads at deadrat who came up with d-bus _without_ looking at the DCE/RPC specification (the spec for D-BUS is near-identical to The Open Group's DCE/RPC specification - with 80% of the required _useful_ functionality _removed_).

* the linux kernel not embracing-and-incorporating the oskit project and the l4linux project

* nobody funding exchange for unix - not in six years since i attempted (three times) to start the reverse-engineering (and got about 15% or so of the way there, the last time i tried).

* nobody funding xanadux (the most likely chance for a community-owned linux mobile phone) despite the fact that its successful launch would be a _major_ PR coup.

here's the thing: i agree with what you say _except_ the bit about individual developers and groups-of-developers "changing" expectations. there's absolutely no chance that one person can handle the kinds of necessary projects that will _help_ people: the level of complexity is _just_ not practical to handle "part-time" and it's too _much_ for even one "full-time" developer to do.

free software has gone _beyond_ the point where a simple "hack" will meet the expectations of "ordinary" users - and mostly that is because "ordinary" users expect "windows" and everything that comes with it - and that's a multi-man-decade development effort to "catch up" with.

with all the in-fighting and flame-wars, we (collectively) have a _lot_ to answer for.