I just read an interview with Federico Mena-Quintero, which is a good read in its entirety, but one thing struck me as being a very important change to how GNOME is being developed.

Federico says (emphasis mine): “The latest thing is that now things have to go through the design team first, and I don’t think that is a good thing; there should not be a central body of control that decides how things are done, because that simply doesn’t scale. And it also doesn’t teach people in how to do design properly. I really would like to move to a model where, instead of having a central body of people who can veto things in or out, we can have a shared understanding of what constitutes good design and implementation.”

This has been very important in my personal development as a programmer. I remember the vivid discussions about usability on the gnome lists with well-known names like Havoc Pennington. And they helped me enormously to form my own opinions on these matters.

From a (safe ;-) distance it seems like GNOME is missing a big opportunity to teach the world, oh alright, other free software developers about good design and thereby giving chances to new developers to learn from their peers. Specifically, it is not as easy as it once was for a casual observer to gain an understanding of the concepts and their implementation that are the basis for gnome development and that’s a real pity, I believe.