The maintainer of some of the common extensions to customise the GNOME desktop is stepping down and in search of somebody to take over growth after a fundraising effort backfired.

Charles Gagnon wrote on the Dash to Panel GitHub web page this week:

Quebec-based Gagnon of Decymal has been concerned in Sprint to Panel since January 2018, although his contributions do not return so far as the mission’s origins. In its first couple of years, a lot of the work was completed by Jason DeRose, though he hasn’t made any modifications since 2021. The extension was initially based mostly on the Zorin OS taskbar by Artyom Zorin – nevertheless Sprint to Panel’s original README says that it was in flip based mostly on Michele Gaio’s Dash to Dock. (Much more folks use that extension. Not solely does it have almost 9 million downloads, however the Ubuntu Dock is a fork of Dash to Dock.) So if another person does take over, it will not be the primary time.

Gagnon’s transfer follows an try to boost some donations that backfired badly. The Dash to Panel extension, which on the time of writing has been downloaded a formidable 4,009,303 occasions, merges two parts of the GNOME Shell, the highest bar and the “sprint,” right into a single, Home windows-like taskbar. The mission’s GitHub page contains quite a few screenshots showcasing its look.

His effort to boost funds for the mission has gone down exceptionally badly with some customers, because the feedback on the change reveals. Gagnon requested for some money by including a pinned app icon to the panel, within the type of a pink coronary heart. Clicking it revealed a message requesting donations, and this – along with the menu choice to cover the brand new icon – had a 20-second timeout connected. The mixture of grabbing the primary place on the panel (and the accompanying hotkey) and the enforced wait upset a number of customers, with feedback calling it an “agressive [sic] donation push,” complaining that “this stage of pressured interplay with a donation request is totally unacceptable,” and “I do not assume belief ought to be positioned upon the mission and it is [sic] core builders.”

In response, Gagnon moved the donation buttons to the tip of the icons within the panel, however the thread of complaints continued. Authentic developer Jason DeRose commented:

Gagnon replied:

DeRose responded with remorse:

It is a disgrace, however after such a backlash, even together with a rebuke from the earlier primary developer, we won’t say we completely blame him. The quantity of complaints underscores the extension’s recognition; many individuals use this software every day. It is also a normal a part of some distros, such because the AlmaLinux-based Oreon Lime.

fund FOSS growth is an ever-growing downside, and this vulture tends to agree with original open source pioneer Bruce Perens: the FOSS world must invent new varieties of post-GPL licenses, ones that assist builders receives a commission. A couple of many years in the past, nag screens in shareware had been the norm. This was completely acceptable in the ’80s. Clearly, such techniques are now not tolerated.

Gagnon is not the one open supply maintainer dropping by the wayside this week. Within the same email that introduced the release of KDE Plasma 6.3.3, the mission’s launch supervisor, Jonathan Riddell, mentioned:

Riddell has been concerned in KDE for a very long time, and was one of many founding volunteers who helped begin the Kubuntu remix of Ubuntu. For some time, Canonical employed him, though that position ended a decade ago – albeit not with out a few years’ advanced warning. ®


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