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This (google cache - the OLPC wiki seems to be down) should help you (it's a bit clunky, but it works fine)

yeah

The project later released an experimental gameplay framework to help in your rapid prototyping, consisting of many of the tools they built during the project itself. It's slashdotted now, so here's the Google cache for immediate satisfaction.

While you probably can't call the Pidgin developers wild-eyed radicals (heck, a fair number of us don't use any software projects started after about 1998 with any regularity), we do have the tendency, from time to time, to shake up the Pidgin UI in a quest for improvement. Unfortunately, these genuine quests for improvement are almost always accompanied by a rich cacophony of "I hate the new !". There are also often responses which are more useful and coherent, but this article is not about those responses.

He talks about standard responses to UI complaints as if they are grudgingly listened to by developers and the "patches welcome" reply is generally used as an OSS way to tell users to go-climb-a-tree. Read the whole article.

The OP makes it seem like all of the developers are acting arrogant and unreceptive to users wishes. This is not the case.

It's not that they think they are right and everyone is wrong. They just don't want to spend hours hacking with GTK+ to get it working correctly. Sean Egan posted this on the Trac ticket:

"The main problem is getting GTK+ to play nice with auto-resising and user-resizing. If anyone wants to submit a patch that gets it all right, I would gladly accept it."

Sean Egan is the the project leader of the pidgin project. The guy that ran off and made a fork could have sent a working patch, one that lets users enable or disable, and it would have been integrated.

Etan Reisner makes an ass of himself when he says

"Enjoy using Trillian, or whatever other client you choose. Oh, and the fact that someone actually took the time to implement the preference for switching back to the old behaviour is a very nice surprise and I would like to thank nodashi for doing so (assuming the patch is yours). I have no intention of accepting such a patch because I still believe that is the wrong way to fix this and I would think it could be written as a plugin as well, but it at least shows a proper way of handling this situation and for that I want to commend you."

Fortunately for the users he is not the project leader.

My guess for the future is that Etan will get respect-minus-minus from the other developers on the team and a patch will be integrated to add the option.

Google cache of TFA: http://209.85.175.104/search?q=cache:Y2FtyYRKu2YJ:torrentfreak.com/baywords-pirate-bay-blog-080416/+baywords&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2, and the page in question http://www.baywords.com/.