So, actually I let acabal hoist himself by his own petard a bit. Dictatorship is the wrong choice of words for what I think he's describing and serves to obfus

So, actually I let acabal hoist himself by his own petard a bit. Dictatorship is the wrong choice of words for what I think he's describing and serves to obfuscate the manner in which decisions are actually made in creative projects. There are a lot of places where having a centralized ultimate authority is very very very important, but in which individual autonomy is still preserved and let flourish. Newspapers are a good example. There's an editor who's in charge and they're in charge of the tone, direction and disposition of the sorts of things the paper is going to cover. They may even write for their own paper, but the sum of the paper is always going to be more than just what they've directly put in. Nevertheless, it's really important that the editor sets priorities for the newsroom, and manages what everyone is aiming at. Are there bad newspaper editors? Hell yes. Are there strategies to circumvent bad editors? Yes again. Is it sometimes easier just to find another job than deal with an editors bullshit? Yep again http://theadvocate.com/home/5922742-125/pulitzer-winners-leave-times-picayune-for http://theadvocate.com/home/5922742-125/pulitzer-winners-lea... Where software tends to differ from things like a newspaper hierarchy (or something like the police department from the Wire), is that it is okay to have discussions of efficacy and criticize a project's leadership (which tends to happen ALL THE FREAKING TIME). And this is where it's relevant to discuss the way that designers prioritize and deflect criticism of their priorities (as i mentioned in reply to acabal: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5767301 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5767301 ). Successful designers try to figure out what their usebase actually needs and in an priority order that makes sense to deliver them in. People complained bitterly that the iPhone didn't even have copy & paste which is a feature that didn't show up until iOS3. Didn't seem to hurt the iPhone's sales, though. In that vein, i'm still entirely unsure as to whether Gnome is doing the wrong thing (particularly because i haven't seen anyone actually articulate what's wrong w/ Gnome3 in a meaningful way, and i have no idea who Gnome3's current actual userbase is, and who their intended userbase is). What's the alternative? Well, there's a couple. Someone should articulate a reasonable case to the Gnome guys as to why their vision is wrong. If that doesn't work, fork the project and let the userbase decide on where the project should go. If you decide you don't like centralized authority in creative endeavors, i guess you can try to invent some new method of project direction (or heck borrow Debian's i guess), but all of these endeavors have their tradeoffs. Debian moves slow, community forking is divisive, and trying to articulate why you are right and the Gnome guys are wrong is potentially futile. ------------------------------------------------- I guess the tl;dr is this. Design and (organizational) politics are interlinked, but they're not the same thing. You can be good at design and bad at politics. You can be good at politics and bad at design. In the Gnome debate, it is unclear to me which side is good at either of these qualities.