On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 10:50 AM, Matteo Settenvini <
[email protected]> wrote:
> Il giorno ven, 16/08/2013 alle 10.17 -0400, Jasper St. Pierre ha
> scritto:
> > As I've said before, GNOME uses proprietary services for collaboration
> > and outreach.
> >
> > We have active presences on the proprietary communication services
> > Google+, Facebook, and Twitter. We displayed a large Twitter wall at
> > GUADEC showing tweets tagged with the hashtag #guadec.
> >
> > GitHub is just another one of these services we use for community
> > outreach, and I fail to see how it's any different than any of the
> > others.
> >
>
> You are of course right. The matter should be probably discussed, as
> those services have the same problems of github, and free alternatives
> do exist.
>
> > There's possibly a discussion to have about whether GNOME should use
> > proprietary services for outreach, but GitHub isn't really anything
> > new here. In my opinion, if you feel strongly about the use of
> > proprietary services for outreach, perhaps GNOME isn't the greatest
> > fit for you.
>
> Excuse me, but I happen to like GNOME, to like how it's designed, build,
> and the developer community it has. I love GNOME devs, and I think they
> are some of the best guys in FLOSS. I like the attention to details, the
> project license, and the respect of the users freedom that comes with
> it. Last time I checked, it is still part of the GNU Project! It was one
> of the main reasons I got away from KDE years ago, in favor of GNOME.
>
> Why shouldn't I try to change the (poor) direction things are taking to
> preserve a piece of software, freedom and above all community I have an
> emotional attachment to? Or is it already the situation so desperate
> that GNOME is not "the greatest fit" for me, and I should look elsewhere
> ("don't bother, go away")?
>
> In the end, I might just do so, if everyone turns out to be uninterested
> in the fundamental values of free software. For once, I might start by
> canceling my monthly donations. And with me, others — fewer than you
> would gain by aggressive marketing, sure, but still. I always advocate
> for GNOME. I'd hate starting to advocate against it.
>
> You can indeed become fairly popular ignoring fundamental users'
> freedoms (look at Ubuntu). But what are you willing to give up just to
> be popular? Many a showgirl would give answers on that topic that would
> make a seasoned sailor blush... I hope GNOME is not selling out.
>
> In the end, you just find yourself more and more tied to those
> proprietary services you tried to escape in the first place by creating
> a system such as GNOME. If you have a Facebook account, for instance,
> think how willing you are to close it down, even now after seeing the
> Snowden datagate emerging.
>
> Besides, while github is not free, gitorious and others are. Diaspora is
> still experimental and not on-par with things such as Google+ or
> Facebook, but gitorious is a good alternative. So even on a technical
> level, this choice reeks. Also because by working with e.g. the
> gitorious team, one could have also found more bugs / asked for some
> features which would then be fixed in an open-source product, benefiting
> the community at large. So there's an indirect contribution too to the
> well-being of everyone.
>
gitorious is not an good alternative.
It's slow, buggy, and does not support the common operations that GitHub
does. I can't view images from the gitorious viewer. I can't view raw files.
I've never managed to get in contact with the gitorious team. As far as I
can tell, they've fallen off the face of the earth.
Ask Richard Hughsie why he moved colord from gitorious to GitHub. There's
good reasons we're trying to get away from it.
> I'm not implying a slippery-slope argument here: I don't think GNOME
> will become closed source in the near future, or anything like that. But
> there have been constant signs of going adrift in latest years, and not
> always users have been heard out / notified. A community needs to be
> built, or it will dissolve. While I appreciate the development effort
> went into GNOME in the 3.x cycle, I also believe that it has not gotten
> better at all in community-building, hemorrhaging users to other DEs.
> And it won't be Facebook, Google+ or github to solve the fundamental
> problem: poor communication and unilateral decisions (especially from
> the designers, sorry guys) instead of building consensus or at least
> discussing why their ideas are sounder than the others'.
>
> Anyway, interoperability from GNOME's side with proprietary systems is
> good. It allows users, if informed correctly, even to migrate and
> transition to open systems. But relying on proprietary systems still
> sends the wrong message, imho. It's like we cannot come up with
> something working ourselves.
>
We aren't relying on proprietary systems. It's just a mirror; GitHub isn't
our primary hosting system, and http://git.gnome.org/ will still exist.
It's there so that we have an official GitHub presence so that GitHub users
don't need to manually manage their own forks.
>
> Else, give GMail accounts to all @gnome.org people, and just put an
> alias into place. And move MLs to google groups. Maintaining a mail
> server is quite frankly a pain in the ass, spam filters, CVEs and all,
> so why losing sysadmining time onto it, when GMail works technically
> better than anything else going around? (that was a rhetorical question,
> of course).
>
> Cheers,
> --
> Matteo Settenvini
> FSF Associated Member
> Email : [email protected]
>
>
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--
Jasper
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