Just look the way he expresses himself:
In his own blog page

@Jarral: Please start your own survey, or shut the fuck up.
I’m serious.

In the gnome mailing list:

Pointing to Lefty for being guilty of intentionally creating ambiguity
is nothing more than either being a moron, or being so disinterested
that you don’t know who said what first.

The funny thing in the last quote is that he later complains of (non-existent) ad-hominem attacks.
Now the ducks are firing at the shotguns!

> You always seem to devolve into ad-hominem, personal attacks.

When a person falsely accuses Lefty of putting bias in his surveys THEN
you apparently don’t need to respond with the ad-hominem bomb??!!

Of course Emilio Pozuelo Monfort had to explain the difference
to Philip that a dissenting opinion is not ad-hominem:

Huh? If I say “Lefty, you’re an idiot”, that’s ad-hominem, but if I say “Lefty, your survey is biased” it’s not.

Emilio

This is the guy that likes to portray himself as “intellectually honest” while at the same time likes insult anyone who contradicts him.

Poor Philip, he is always working hard to ridicule himself. So much to say for the “intellectually honest” guy.

Thank you for your comments! I think you have summed up the situation quite succinctly indeed.

GNOME is one example of a danger facing successful Free Software projects: once your project is reliable, popular and has a strong community, it becomes a target for “hijacking” by those who appreciate the end result, but not the method of the success.

It is nauseating to me to see people — specifically two people: Philip Van Hoof and above all, David Schlesinger (“Lefty”) — tear this community apart. Their strident, tireless opposition to the Free Software movement (RMS, the FSF, the GNU project, most of Gnome, and many others) is driving lots of people away. At least Philip probably makes some technical contributions, whereas “Lefty’s” only contribution to Gnome seems to be an endless supply of divisive, poisonous rhetoric.

If the leadership within Gnome doesn’t soon find the courage to take the difficult, but necessary step of expelling “Lefty” and maybe Philip from the project, I don’t think it has much of a future (perhaps Philip would recover the ability to stfu and get back to coding if “lefty” wasn’t always around to tag-team with). Since both have publicly declared on many occasions that they are opposed to Free Software principles and the GNU project (of which Gnome is a part), I think there is ample grounds to do so.

Talented free software developers can find plenty of projects to work on which have a welcoming community and well-understood, *shared* goals. Gnome used to be such a community, but has now been infiltrated by a handful of people (maybe only a couple) who are vociferously opposed to the original mission of the project (a Free Software desktop), and are constantly working to undermine it. For the free software developers who remain, constantly having to struggle with these “poisonous people” to preserve the founding principles of their project must be very tiring, and can’t be very much fun. For the engineers who are paid to work on Gnome, it may not matter, but an environment like this will not attract and retain volunteer contributors.

All in all, it’s very disappointing to see. Hopefully the Gnome leadership will deal with this problem before the project is reduced to nothing more than a mailing list with two subscribers (Philip and “Lefty”) talking at one another. For David Schlesinger, I expect this would be regarded as “mission accomplished”, but I would regard it as a sad and useless substitute for Gnome’s original mission.

Why that gentleman who in the same email message says:

I can see you have an ideology. That’s fine for you. I respectfully disassociate myself from simplistic slogans, though.

Is in fact the same individual who created the slur-meme simplistic slogan “I’m not afraid of people writing code”.

The hypocrisy would be amusing if it wasn’t so nauseating.

Who is this guy and why do the Gnome developers let him ruin Gnome? Wasnt Gnome founded because of the lack of free software in KDE? It sure looks as if Gnome has been subverted by outsiders and bribed insiders working for Microsoft.