It's completely unintuitive to me that open source software, which anyone can fork and make their own version of, could go 18 years without a basic feature like

It's completely unintuitive to me that open source software, which anyone can fork and make their own version of, could go 18 years without a basic feature like this. Makes me think that something about Gnome's open source model is not working. Great in theory, but lacking in results.