Nothing really to add to the flames, so go elsewhere if you wanted some flaming, but all this Gimmie vs Big Board thing reminded me of some similar situations, like Xgl, gnome-session-manager, Ximian Desktop, etc, etc, where software done, let’s call it “in-house”, by companies upset lots of people.
Although, AFAIK, those companies (Novell, RedHat and any others involved in past situations like these one) have nothing to demonstrate about their support of free software (lots of good free software came from them, some developers from them are very well known community members, etc), there is clearly something wrong going on, if every time those “in-house” software projects are announced people from the GNOME community get upset. Maybe it is the companies, not really paying all the attention they should to the upstream projects, or maybe it is the community, which likes seeing conspirations everywhere?
Whatever the answer is, I think we have a problem (maybe not that big, but a problem after all), so we should be doing something about it. Maybe the new release team’s plans can help in some way, like having a central place not only for keeping track of GNOME’s official modules development, but about any new development going on in the GNOME constellation? Also, maybe suggesting the companies affiliated to the GNOME Foundation to get more involved with the GNOME project?
I doubt those community reactions are based on paranoia. In my opinion they are based on the fact, that secret in-house development greatly violates the open development process of the free software community. One key feature of free software development is, that everyone interested has the chance to influence future developments. But developing in house and agressively pushing those huge chunks of code _by purpose_ circumvents this essential piece of our community for the stupid goal of saving some time in the initial development steps. I consider that decision stupid as you pay for the initial savement by big efforts and endless discussions when pushing those in-house chunks upstream. Guess those initial kick-off weeks of public discussion quickly pay back when arranging with the community from the start.