Sorry, I'm not saying that what they're saying isn't ego-based. I really don't know because I wasn't there for the conversation. What I'm saying is, the only way you can shift it from being ego-based to being fact-based is to present those facts that show the right way, or at least find a way to change the conversation into being headed in that direction. Just calling out ego-based behavior isn't enough. To me this has applied to every professional situation, it's how to keep any meeting on-track and avoid having coworkers getting into fights about egos. If you don't have the data then it's going to be hard to make a convincing argument, I don't know a good solution to this unfortunately. It requires real work and you may have to get creative. At a big company often the most convincing argument you can make is that a decision will save X amount of dollars, so you can start from there. For a volunteer open source project you will have to find out what else really motivates the developers and then go from there.
Apple I think is a good example. It only mattered to Apple when it cost them a non-significant amount of resources. Ultimately they are a company and they respond to profit, if people buy or don't buy the product then that's the strongest fact that will influence them. Also I think it is a misconception that GNOME has a lot of money from Red Hat. They don't really from what I've seen, most of the Red Hat people I know are pretty strapped for time. I also have no idea what you mean by forced it as default. Distros don't have to choose it, I've seen many distros that choose other things or just don't have a default. If you mean things like Ubuntu, IIRC they chose to retire Unity and go with GNOME because Unity wasn't profitable for them. So with companies it always comes back to that...
I also don't really think it is useful to call out people for imposing their vision. On a certain level, everyone who builds things is doing that. They have their point of view and that's the only thing they can express, because well, what else would they express? If they expressed your point of view all the time, then they wouldn't be themselves, they would be you. It's possible to change someone else's vision but that's usually done by presenting new information, i.e. convincing facts.
Apple I think is a good example. It only mattered to Apple when it cost them a non-significant amount of resources. Ultimately they are a company and they respond to profit, if people buy or don't buy the product then that's the strongest fact that will influence them. Also I think it is a misconception that GNOME has a lot of money from Red Hat. They don't really from what I've seen, most of the Red Hat people I know are pretty strapped for time. I also have no idea what you mean by forced it as default. Distros don't have to choose it, I've seen many distros that choose other things or just don't have a default. If you mean things like Ubuntu, IIRC they chose to retire Unity and go with GNOME because Unity wasn't profitable for them. So with companies it always comes back to that...
I also don't really think it is useful to call out people for imposing their vision. On a certain level, everyone who builds things is doing that. They have their point of view and that's the only thing they can express, because well, what else would they express? If they expressed your point of view all the time, then they wouldn't be themselves, they would be you. It's possible to change someone else's vision but that's usually done by presenting new information, i.e. convincing facts.