It is interesting you make the observation about GNOME and Apple. In 1999, GNOME had the involvement, and financial resources, of some of those Apple people due to Eazel. Andy Hertzfeld, Bud Trimble, Susan Kare, Mike Boich and more all gave improving GNOME and Linux some work.

This wasn’t a hostile takeover attempt; we all tried very hard to be team players, many times to what I think was our detriment. A very nice version of Nautilus was rejected because it was in C++ and we ended up doing all the work in GTK.

We had some very good ideas about distributed objects but they were pushed aside and we ended up using CORBA/ORBit/Bonobo and those distributed object systems ended up being replaced.

The dotcom crash caused a lot of Eazel people to end up at Apple. Nat and Miguel moved onto their dot NET Xamarin effort and many others ended up at Red Hat. There was an experience vacuum and this is one reason why the GNOME UX had so many issues IMHO.