What does "competing on the market" mean? Do you get a salary for working on Gnome projects, which depends on how many people use your software?
Like I said, I don't offer to block them. I offer to have them as a low priority. What is the GOAL of the Gnome project? Dominating the desktop market? Becoming a monopoly? Since when is "increasing the user base" a primary goal? If that's we're after, let's start writing closed-source software. Microsoft, Google, Facebook and many others succeed more than Gnome, maybe we should just follow them and abandon the Free Software idea. Now seriously, which goal is more important: spreading software freedom and free-as-in-freedom computing, or just getting more people to use Gnome (which doesn't increase anyone's salary anyway)? I guess we do agree on the goals. The question is, what's the order of priorities. The internet is already free enough for free software to use. But clearly Facebook and Google aren't, so you can't compare. Eventually we can add Diaspora plugins and so on, and let the users choose freedom if they wish, but that's not the point. In my opinion, the point is that the developers themselves should care about software freedom, and make that a high-priority goal, rather than feeding their ego by having users migrate to Gnome. You can't spread freedom if you're not consistent with your own ideas. People will say, "all that open source/free software thing is bullshit, look at them. They supply a direct connection to Facebook and GMail and Twitter from the desktop, before them even bother to give us a free alternative. It's all bullshit, let's go back to Windows." First choose goals, priorities and values, then make a plan according to them. Writing free software doesn't make us angels and doesn't give us any excuse to give free software a bad name by showing more support to Facebook, Youtube and Google than we show to Diaspora, MediaGoblin and MyKolab (or whatever can replace GMail and google calendar using free software). So do as you wish, just keep a clear list of priorities. The winners are the ones who remain last in the field. The ones who persist. The ones who swim against the current when they need to. The sheep which don't blindly follow the herd. The ones who aren't afraid of cold water. Assuming you consider software freedom as victory... I do. - Anatoly Krasner On ו', 2013-04-12 at 18:04 +0200, Andre Klapper wrote: > On Fri, 2013-04-12 at 01:46 +0300, אנטולי קרסנר wrote: > > Fact: many of them know it's bad. Fact: it > > doesn't make them stop using it. Fact: if Gnome is good enough without > > Facebook, it can help them stop using it. Fact: it supplies integration > > and GOA accounts, thus the users remain addicted. > > Fact: many people are addicted to the internet. If GNOME did not provide > a browser or even internet connectivity, GNOME could help them stop > using the internet. > > So I've seen the "This Free and Open Source Project should educate its > users about non-free services!" opinion across several FOSS projects I > am/was involved in. "Make it harder for users to use non-free but > convenient services" is a great way to decrease your userbase, but > providing *better* services than the non-free ones and competing on the > market might be more sustainable. I won't stop you from doing that. > > andre _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
