> Would it have made a difference if Ubuntu had removed all Gnome branding from their desktop? Then things like this wouldn't matter, no? GNOME has never clear

> Would it have made a difference if Ubuntu had removed all Gnome branding from their desktop? Then things like this wouldn't matter, no? GNOME has never clearly defined the confines of what kind of differentiation is "doing GNOME", and what kind is "breaking away from GNOME". There's also no clear answer to the question of whether GNOME should be a complete end-user product, or a supermarket for makers of end-user products to pick and choose components from, or something in between, or something else. Every distribution patches GNOME. Just about nobody ever uses GNOME as it comes in the tarballs, except for development and bug triage. Moblin, Maemo (now together as MeeGo), OLPC, Nokia and others have shipped vastly differentiated systems meant for different niches built on the GNOME stack, without much anybody labeling them as infidels. If people suddenly hold Ubuntu to a different standard solely on the grounds of differentiation, that's not fair. Differentiation or fragmentation are not going to be the actually problematic parts of the switch to Unity from a community standpoint. The two worst bits of news are: 1) that as an unaffiliated contributor who intends to fix or improve a major part of Ubuntu's default desktop environment, you didn't have to sign a disturbing contributor agreement that doesn't guarantee the freedom of your code in the future until now, but from now on, you probably will 2) Ubuntu's default desktop environment is now a single-stakeholder product that one company will exert very strong control over, regardless of how well they handle the community side. The latter is also incredibly good news UX-wise, but I digress.