Remember Slashdot and the "Slashdot Effect"? Slashdot was pretty much a forum for FOSS. It was already mainstream. And this is 1998 or so. The GNOME team caused massive drama when they started their campaign against Qt (and, thus, KDE) on Slashdot.
And on that point, GNOME was a reactionary project. It was not started as a community of people coming together to create good software. It simply wasn't. I was there (mostly observing from the Gtk+/GIMP side at the horror show). Gnumeric was slapped together in like one day. It was pure 100% trash code. All that CORBA, ORBit, etc. stuff was tossed together. GNOME was a movement that feared KDE would beat them to the "Linux on the desktop", and their initial versions were designed to play catch-up with KDE's feature set. I can't overstate how shit early GNOME code was. And then they took to Slashdot to bash the less-than-free Qt because GNOME certainly wasn't winning on merit alone.
The free software community has been a shitshow for as long as such a thing has existed. Go back to the homebrew movement and see how people reacted to Bill Gates selling proprietary software.
Anyone remember that Andrew Tanenbaum/Linus Torvalds flamewar? That was in 1992. This debate reverberated throughout the entire 1990s.
People didn't need Twitter to throw shade and cast doubts. Usenet was a perfectly fine medium for this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_deb...
Remember Slashdot and the "Slashdot Effect"? Slashdot was pretty much a forum for FOSS. It was already mainstream. And this is 1998 or so. The GNOME team caused massive drama when they started their campaign against Qt (and, thus, KDE) on Slashdot.
And on that point, GNOME was a reactionary project. It was not started as a community of people coming together to create good software. It simply wasn't. I was there (mostly observing from the Gtk+/GIMP side at the horror show). Gnumeric was slapped together in like one day. It was pure 100% trash code. All that CORBA, ORBit, etc. stuff was tossed together. GNOME was a movement that feared KDE would beat them to the "Linux on the desktop", and their initial versions were designed to play catch-up with KDE's feature set. I can't overstate how shit early GNOME code was. And then they took to Slashdot to bash the less-than-free Qt because GNOME certainly wasn't winning on merit alone.
The free software community has been a shitshow for as long as such a thing has existed. Go back to the homebrew movement and see how people reacted to Bill Gates selling proprietary software.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists