Questioning corporate involvement in GNOME development

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It is a rare free software project that feels it has too many developers; indeed, most could benefit from more development help. One way to get that help is to have a company pay developers to work on a project; the presence of paid developers is often one of the first signs that a particular project is gaining traction. But paid developers often bring with them worries that the company footing the bill will seek to drive the project in undesirable directions. The GNOME project, which is conducting its annual election for its board of directors until June 8, has an opportunity to say that corporate involvement in development has gone too far — or not.

In particular, board candidate Emily Gonyer has taken the position that corporations have too much control over the GNOME project. Her declaration of candidacy is explicit on this subject:

It is my opinion that GNOME has strode too far towards a corporate-driven project and away from its community-led roots. As of now, GNOME is, in my opinion too beholden to a small handful of large corporations which forces the project to ignore large swaths of our users in preference to them. The end result being that GNOME has lost a tremendous portion of its respect and goodwill in the wider free software community. As a member of the GNOME board of directors I will actively work against this tide and towards the more open, community-driven project that GNOME once was and I hope will be again.

After a bit of discussion, it became clear that Emily was concerned about one company in particular:

But for the last several years, Red Hat's wants/needs have trumped what anyone else wants/needs, including the larger user base of GNOME which is what (I believe) has driven it to fracture into so many [desktop environments] over the last 3-4 years.

She also stated that contributions from unpaid developers should be "favored" in some unspecified way. A project like GNOME, she said, should be run and developed by volunteers.

Needless to say, this set of opinions is not shared by everybody in the GNOME development community. Bastien Nocera (a Red Hat developer) made it clear that he found that position insulting. Even Richard Stallman chimed in, saying "We're happy when the developers of free software get paid." But Emily's remarks will certainly resonate with some developers; concerns about corporate involvement in free software projects is more widespread than one might think.

In this case, it is not entirely clear that companies are behind whatever difficulties GNOME may be facing. The GNOME project has clearly struggled in recent years; the proliferation of GNOME forks and ongoing criticism of the project's core decisions make that clear. But it has not been demonstrated that some sort of corporate agenda is behind these problems; it is not in Red Hat's interest, for example, to cause users to flee from its flagship desktop environment. If corporate desires have truly "trumped what anyone else wants/needs," it should be possible to point out specific examples where this trumping has happened, but such examples are not (yet) on offer.

Equally unclear is what can be done about this problem, if, indeed, it is deemed to be a problem. Certainly the GNOME board could, if it were sufficiently determined, manage to reduce the amount of company involvement in GNOME development. That does not seem like anybody's idea of the path to happiness and the Year of the Linux Desktop, though. So one would have to attack the problem at the other end by trying to increase the level of volunteer contributions. The GNOME project appears to work hard already at attracting new developers; examples include its Google Summer of Code participation, the Outreach Program for Women, and numerous conferences around the world. There is undoubtedly more that could be done to bring in new developers, but it is hard to fault the project for its current efforts.

Another option, suggested by former GNOME executive director Stormy Peters, would be to increase corporate participation by bringing in support from a wider range of companies. Involvement from more companies would serve to reduce the influence of any given member of the group. That seems like the sort of task the board of directors should be concerned with.

For the curious, Dave Neary and Vanessa David performed a survey of corporate involvement in GNOME development back in 2010. Their report [PDF] showed that unpaid developers, while making up about 70% of the development community, accounted for just under 25% of the contributions to the project; a group of about a dozen companies, led by Red Hat, accounted for the bulk of the rest. How that picture may have changed since 2010 is unclear; no followup survey has been done thus far. But things probably have not shifted to the point that any single corporation has a dominating influence over the development of the GNOME project as a whole.

And that is important. When a project is controlled by a single company, that company's needs will almost certainly win out over anything that the wider community may want to do. One need only look at Android for a classic example; company-dominated projects can still be valuable free software, but they tend not to be community-driven. If GNOME were to be controlled by a single company, it might well go in directions that would not be welcomed by its development community. Some people, it seems, feel that one company has indeed reached a level of control where it is able to take the project in unwelcome directions.

When one reads the discussion among the candidates for the board, there is one topic that stands out by its absence: with the exception of Emily, none of the candidates have expressed any discomfort with the direction of the GNOME project or the functioning of its community. Perhaps that is appropriate; there may be no cause for concern. But, again, the forks and ongoing controversies suggest that the project might want to be asking itself whether all of its decisions have been wise. Emily may or may not have found the correct target when she named corporate involvement, but she may be doing the project a favor by asking, in a high-profile way, whether something might be wrong.

In any case, the GNOME community now has an opportunity to make a statement about corporate participation and the direction of GNOME development. If enough GNOME developers are sympathetic to Emily's position, they will elect her to the board and she will be able to push for change, though there are limits to what the board (which is not empowered to make technical decisions) can do. Her chances are reasonably good; there are eleven candidates for the eight available positions. Voting continues through June 8, with the results to be announced on the 10th.

