But it wasn’t GNOME’s project—they took over maintenance of something that was used by many, and for many years maintained this trust, acting benevolently. But

But it wasn’t GNOME’s project—they took over maintenance of something that was used by many, and for many years maintained this trust, acting benevolently. But more recently (mostly from GTK+ 3 on) they have acted increasingly hostilely, thoroughly violating the trust placed in them by the community. And the way things have happened makes it very difficult to successfully fork it, quite similarly to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish theory (though in a somewhat different space). It’s made particularly hard by the fact that GTK+ 3 and GTK 4 each make deeply-interwoven good and bad changes, so forking from an earlier version would be a significant regression as well as a significant fix. Combine the general mutual incompatibilities and how deeply GTK is woven into apps, and forking becomes quite impractical.