I'm not the author of this blog post. If I was, I would tell you.

>If you don't believe me believe the SDL dev, or the LXQT devs (formally LXDE, but they had a falling out with gnome), or the many many other devs that do have legitimate criticism.

That isn't valid criticism because the whole reason that situation came about is because those devs also wanted to do what they wanted, and it conflicted with what GNOME wanted. No one's at fault here, it's just a normal healthy disagreement. When you start saying "I'm angry, this disagreement means the side I disagree with is shitty bad people, now they owe me" then you're the one pulling the discussion into an unhealthy, toxic territory. So please check yourself and avoid that.

>It can, but if it does then it should expect to lose social capital and good will.

>The good news is that it's a comparatively well connected and well funded open source project

Again, it's really funny that you think any of these open source projects are well-funded or that they ever had social capital to spare. I've seen near constant trolling and bad faith accusations leveled at these volunteers for years, at the same time I've seen nearly all of them struggle with money, and comparatively few people willing to raise a hand to help out. Your problem here is you're not focused on helping rebuild any of this social capital. You're trying to take more of it away and replace it with nothing. It's destructive instead of constructive. I don't know how you can expect anyone to make progress here to rebuild when you're actively taking more of it away with the trash talk.

>on the topic of "finding a common ground to move forward", well that's almost exactly the advice I'd give the Gnome project in regards to rebuilding some of that social capital and good will. But I really do think the ball is in their court at this point, and the claims that they are un-interested in cooperation, or in any supporting the broader open source community, well I'd say that's fair. Most open source software has a certain amount of good will towards other open source software, SDL is a backbone of open source and if they ask you to please reconsider well then... you reconsider. They've helped the broader open source community out a lot so you help them out.

This paragraph is more meaningless fluff. Avoid this. "The GNOME Project" isn't a person that can just decide to do something. It's a loose group of volunteers working on what they want to work on. If an individual (for example, you) wants to go and start cooperating then they just do it. Continuously asking other people to do it for you is an empty gesture. It's time for you to stop thinking like you're a cop or a lawyer throwing accusations around and trying to calculate just how much social capital others have that you can take away from them. Instead think like a diplomat, think how you can help others reconsider and patch things up. Think how you can give back social capital to everyone around you including those you disagree with. Think how you can inspire others to do the same. That's how we make good community members who aren't perpetually starting and continuing these pointless fights with one another. That's how we avoid the toxic obsession with attacking all the small decisions made by some project, and instead we focus on uplifting all projects.

>But with gnome it's very clear that we're not all in this together. Gnome is one team, and the broader open source community is another team. They won't help us out, so why should we help them out.

Please, stop with this nonsense. Again you're viewing this as "GNOME vs SDL" when pitting these projects against one another has never been a reasonable way to approach this. These are just free projects on the internet, they're not in competition for anything. Maybe you think they're in competition for developer time, but they actually aren't. Developer time isn't fungible, you can't take a KDE developer and tell them to work on GNOME, or vice versa. They just won't do that.

>Even the basic appearance of compromise would help this out tremendously, something like "well this doesn't really help Gnome but we'll do it anyway" for a few relevant features. Make it a GSoC project or something.

They do actually do that for GSOC projects, you probably just didn't notice because they didn't do it for the few small areas you apparently care about. With GSOC the intern has to select the project they want to work on, or make a proposal themselves. If no intern ever wanted to work on it then maybe you can understand it was probably a bad idea or not that important or interesting? I should stress that the areas you're talking about are like less than 0.1% of the project as a whole. They might be high priority for you but they aren't for most other people.

>but there is a social contract

No, there isn't. The entirety of these projects could disappear off the internet tomorrow and nobody would do a thing about it. It happens all the time, developers lose interest and open source projects just die. The users might complain but they can't force any developer to do something they don't want to do. If you honestly believe there's a social contract, you would do better to take the first step and start helping everyone, instead of demanding that some volunteer does everything for you.