Whenever some piece of free software is discussed, there has to be someone that demands former features to come back or new ones to be added. Nothing wrong with suggesting changes to the software, but demanding them? Go fork it if you want it so bad instead of complaining to people who most probably aren't even being paid.
Over 20 years ago, Matthias Ettrich made a Qt GUI for GIMP. GIMP community apparently didn't like him doing that, don't know why. It may have had something to do with licensing -- at the time the Qt license meant it wasn't free software and there was some drama about KDE becoming popular when it was using Qt and thus a large component was nonfree. I know these facts separately and do not know if they are related, but it seems like all that stuff was happening in a few-months span in 1998. Someone else would have to elaborate more if they remember anything.
> It may have had something to do with licensing -- at the time the Qt license meant it wasn't free software [...]
So the fork basically violated GIMP's license, right? I think it's very far fetched to conclude "GIMP crew will happily throw a hissy fit at any fork" from that!
I don't think they even forked it necessarily, and the Qt hack/patch wasn't even published. It was just presented at some Linux thing. This was the only story I could find that resembled a reason for inferiorhuman's prejudice. There are also hundreds of current existing GIMP forks, and no evidence that the GIMP crew is gearing up for street violence.
I'm not sure I follow your logic, but if it helps clear anything up, I did emphasize that this was an old story, like twice. I am also aware that Qt is GPL now, and that GIMP has hundreds of forks.
You are looking at the wrong number :) That's the total amount of forks on GitHub. Whereas only 15 of them had any commits by people who forked the repository. Among those 15 people:
- One is a regular GIMP contributor.
- One couldn't wait another day for a macOS build of version 2.10.12.
- One patched file association on Windows and submitted his patch to the upstream project.
- Some of the others worked on their pet peeves, and some of them discussed it on the upstream bug tracker.
You might want revisiting your definition of a fork :)
Personally i'd see the first one as suggestion, but the second one is more complex. If it was just "It sucks you got rid of feature x" i wouldn't see it as neither suggestion nor demand (personally i dislike some changes in GIMP, see my other comments in this thread, and do comment on them if they are brought up, but these are just comments about how i see these changes, not suggestions and especially not demands).
The "bring it back" makes all the difference though and yeah, to me that makes a demand.
Besides the actual words from which you can--most of the time--immediately see or at least infer where the comment falls into: politeness and tone. I don't think it's usually hard to know if someone is being aggressive and demanding about it, as far as I can say.
Isn't that how all communication works? Aren't you relying on your perception and cognitive abilities to interpret my comments to reply to them accordingly? What exactly are we discussing here?
Of course my personal interpretations could be wrong; nonetheless, clear-cut cases of users complaining and demonstrating entitlement towards free software developers is something I cannot possibly endorse.
