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There is an air of disquiet again on Planet GNOME - and once again the reason behind it is the way the site is administered.

For the second time in six months, a developer from the GNOME desktop project has openly accused the project's media spokesman, Jeff Waugh, of being unresponsive to requests for changes in a GNOME service that Waugh looks after.

One uses the word "openly" because numerous similar accusations have been made on the GNOME Foundation mailing list - the two cases referred to stand out because they were made on blogs which are owned by the two developers in question.

Rodney Dawes, who maintains things like gnome-icon-theme and evolution-webcal among others, accused Waugh of being unresponsive to requests for changes on GNOME Planet, a site which aggregates blogs from people who are part of the project.

The inclusion of one's blog on the site is now becoming important, because the publicity afforded by having your personal musings on a site that is sanctioned by a project of the size and stature of GNOME carries much more weight than if the same musings were appearing on some remote blog unrelated to the project.

The fact that the syndication happens does not, in any way, detract from the degree of robustness that one sees in the postings. This is apparent from Dawes' post on April 20 when he wrote: "For quite a long time now, Planet GNOME has been quasi-maintained. It is very difficult to get changes made due to the lack of responsiveness from Jeff. But as a GNOME site and service, why is it not maintained by the infrastructure team? Why is it such a pain in the ass for foundation members to get their blog syndicated on planet?"

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Sam Varghese

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A professional journalist with decades of experience, Sam for nine years used DOS and then Windows, which led him to start experimenting with GNU/Linux in 1998. Since then he has written widely about the use of both free and open source software, and the people behind the code. His personal blog is titled Irregular Expression.

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