>From your first quotation I wasn't the only one to be misled by your tone.
Agreed. ISTR from around 2013 Trisquel was then 7 or 8 years old. If it's that old and the actively contributing community is small then you've got to figure that the 'build a community' mode of some [often successful] free software projects has not been copied. A more open communication style has to be part of that method. Ruben as the BDFL carries the can for this. His narrow communication profile, geek subculture method or not, is obviously a strong candidate as part of the problem. Further the bits where he's not best practice geek method - such as an overlong patch acceptance cycle time make matters worse when you consider the limits of normal human persistence. Thing is from what I can workout "the median number of active contributors to a free software project / initiative is one"[1] because an awful lot of people are making similar mistakes. Ruben at least seems to have learnt part of this and be addressing the dev community matter with infrastructure now. Hopefully he'll move on to upping his communications game too. I will observe that many so called 'geek subculture' behaviours are in fact what any kind of geek will devolve to left to her own devices in almost any setting. My own Father e.g. was a farmer, a 'farming geek' and exhibited the same lamentable communication style failings as Ruben. I know and have known plenty of other non-FLOSS technical geeks who do/did as well. In the final analysis free software is but 30 years old, at this stage we're all pretty much still making it up as we go along. Given Ruben has had the smarts to keep Trisquel going for this long, I think we can expect him to work out what the next few steps are and have a good chance of success. [1] LibrePlant 2013 IIRC.
