Is GNOME part of any anti-proprietary software movement?
that terminology didn't come from me. I would rather describe what we
are doing in positive terms: GNOME is part of the free software
movement, which strives to give users freedom.
I don't think so and I've never seen it like
I believe Stormy was quite clear and on point: It sounded to me as though
she were arguing against the sort of prior restraint that you seem to be
attempting to impose here.
I think GNOME activities should not grant legitimacy to non-free
software. This is a minimal form of support
We _were_ attempting to finalize a Code of Conduct which could be provided
to speakers, in the hope of avoiding future instances of the sort of
harmless fun we experienced during Mr. Stallman's keynote at the Gran
Canaria Desktop Summit, as I recall.
What happened there is that
That's where the cash for things like my FSF-E
Fellowship, EFF membership, Creative Commons membership, etc., come from,
see?
These are worthy causes, but I would not encourage anyone to use
non-free software even to get money to give to a worthy cause.
However, the issue here isn't
We wanted Gnome to be a free software stack, and that was our
requirement. Gnome itself was assembled out of the available
components plus the requirements of the community that emerged early on.
GNOME was made out of available components and new components. In
particular, we
You're also stretching the term censorship and related terms to an
area where it does not pertain. For an organization to stand by its
values, and not say things which conflict with those values, is not
censorship.
Fine. We can simply call it prior restraint if you
As a specific example, to the question, Do you agree that viewing
proprietary software as 'illegitimate', 'immoral', 'antisocial' and/or
'unethical' should be a pre-condition for syndication on Planet GNOME?, so
far 151 respondents have answered No, only 19 have answered Yes.
Doesn't this undermines the values of the open source community?
To cite the values of open source as an ethical standard is ironic,
because the motive for open source was to avoid presenting an ethical
standard.
The founders of open source split off from the free software movement
in 1998
5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
I am being discriminated against because I can not make improvements
or discuss where the project is headed.
The definition of open source is a criterion for software licenses;
I don't think it applies to mailing list usage at all.
But I
To deny a group or a person the legitimacy to keep intellectual property
proprietary goes against criteria five of the Open Source Definition:
A statement that uses the term intellectual property is tremendously
vague, since that refers to many laws at once, and treats them as one
single
It is clear that GNOME needs to do more to educate its community,
including the Foundation members, about the importance of freedom;
that is, to communicate and support the ideas of the free software
movement.
The draft statement posted uses the term free software, but
it does not support
Anyway - as I say, for me they're essentially synonyms. For others,
including RMS, they're not.
See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html
for an explanation of the difference in philosophy between free
software and open source.
GNOME is a GNU package, and was
http://live.gnome.org/ProjectPrerequisites
The project must be free/open source software.
That text ought to say, simply, The project must be free software.
Adding open source makes the meaning less clear. There are open
source licenses which are not free; /open source introduces
In response to the first draft, I pointed out that it rejected the
ideas of the free software movement, and the only form of support it
gave was use of the term free software itself. Your new draft
cancels out that little support, by pairing the term with open source.
To fit GNOME's position as
Your suggestions would probably be better received if they didn't sound so
much like orders.
I'm sorry if the tone rubbed you the wrong way, but I think it was
a misunderstanding. I was politely asking for someone to fix some bugs.
Vincent's proposal to explicitly list the acceptable
Thanks for adopting the change I proposed.
Even if a program is proprietary, we invite its developers to use
GNOME as its interface platform.
I think it's a bit more negative
It has to be -- we must not be positive about proprietary software.
However, being more positive about
What's important
to GNOME is the vision and the philosophy of open access,
The philosophy of GNOME is that the user should have freedom.
If we talk in terms of open or access then we omit what is
most important.
Stormy asked people to suggest a vision for 5 years from now. I can't
but none has actually stepped up to write actual code (as Martyn says,
everytime you start writting something, you hit the legacy wall).
It sounds like this might be a case of conflicting goals that cannot
all be satisfied. If so, we might be able to enable progress to start
by making a
Freedom from slavery is a means to an
end, the end being a just society with no racial discrimination and
equal opportunity for all.
Freedom is not merely a means to achieve something else. It is
necessary in its own right. Mere equality of
While freedom is an important factor in life, it is not the only
defining factor for quality of life. At the end of the day, most of us
want a certain level of comfort too.
We need a strong vision and strategy to become best of breed in
software. Merely being free will only
How about a healthy dose of ambition and aim for becoming the best
platform of choice, regardless of the freeness?
If you mean that we would like GNOME to be better than the other
desktops in practical terms, of course we would like that.
That is an answer to the question, Where would we
If the freedom offered needs to be taught and be appreciated, there is a
fundamentally flaw with that. True freedom should be obvious once it is
tasted.
If we had made that our criterion, it would have led us to reject many
past advances in our understanding of human rights.
I value the potential market we can cater as highly important, as this
directly determines the size of the economical ecosystem we can build
around F/OSS. While most of us are not in this to become rich, we all
have to eat and feed the bills. If we want our project to have
A. Try to make GNOME better in practical ways too.
B. Teach him to appreciate freedom, so he will recognize that the
proprietary programs are inherently inferior ethically.
however, point B is pretty much like saying that instead of coming up
with Copyleft you should
If people are going to use Facebook, they should access it with free software.
And it is useful for GNOME to do a good job of that.
At the same time, using Facebook is a harmful practice. It gives a
misleading impression of privacy, it has close ties with the CIA and
probably lets the CIA look
At a technical level, I wish that GNOME made it easier to relate
the visible GUI level to the underlying level of the command line.
When I designed GDB, previous debuggers for C programs had C-level
commands (viewing source code, specifying line numbers, examining data
using symbol names and
I read the OSFA guidelines, http://opensourceforamerica.org/guidelines.
The points it makes are good points; however, as one would expect
from an organization that is aligned with open source, it omits
the stronger points that should have been central. For instance,
that the use of a non-free
So say we all! Unfortunately, I don't see any free (or even close)
alternatives out there. The closest I can find are some local social
networking websites[1] but they've traditionally concentrated on
localization rather than internationalization.
Social networking sites are
Empathy is an instant messaging client, Facebook now allows access to
its chat network via XMPP. I meant that on filling your info Empathy
would configure an account for you so you can chat with your friends in
Facebook using a free software client, Empathy, instead of the web
IMHO talking about Facebook and who should demand them to free info is a
bit out of place here. Please let's not diverge the thread into that or
into a battle about how much we should promote Free Software or non Free
alternatives.
In my fantasies, the free software movement might
The information about Facebook and the CIA comes from The Guardian.
See http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook.
Since it was proposed to write software specifically to talk with
Facebook, I mentioned the issues this would raise. But Facebook is an
example of a more general
It would make more sense perhaps to ask why you need a centralised web
site for this rather than tying it together distributed sites and people
together through links in the same way that rss permits news to be
aggregated without there being some central repository of the world's
Proposed project vision: Hidden in plain sight: Everyone using GNOME,
no-one noticing
This proposed goal might be ill-advised, because it's very good to be
noticed if one do something good. Especially for a project that needs
to attract support from people.
We probably could have
The combination of technologies going under the name HTML 5 have
made/are making web technology based applications finally competitive
with those built using conventional toolkits such as Qt, GTK+, and the
Windows and Mac equivalents.
If everything gets done inside or through
Regarding Facebook's connections with the CIA, see
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook.
The Guardian is a major UK newspaper.
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I wrote:
Let's not be in a rush to invite users to use servers -- even our own
-- instead of their own computers. That is the wrong direction to go.
I chose those words carefully. They do not say we should eliminate
all servers; I don't think that. For some purposes, servers are the
Maemo/Moblin/MeeGo use GNOME and we are proud of that. Of course, we always
encourage organizations and projects to use more free software but we should
not ostracise them because they don't use 100% free software.
It is not a matter of ostracizing anyone. We are glad that they use
I explained in Gran Canaria that supporting C# is useful but depending
on it is risky. Thus, developing programs such as Mono and DotGNU is
fine, but we should not write applications in C#. For explanation of
these points, see http://www.fsf.org/news/dont-depend-on-mono.
This is why GNOME
If GNOME is planning to operate servers, GNOME needs to consider
when it is good or bad to encourage people to use servers.
In the US, if you receive a subpoena to hand over data, you have the
opportunity to plead in court to quash or reduce the subpoena.
Success is not guaranteed; the court may
C# the language, and the core .NET libraries are under a
far-from-ideal Community Promise patent license. Sadly, this patent
grant for the ideas embodied in those standards are made available by
Microsoft to full implementations of C# and those core class
libraries. But they
Why didn't you just say that at the beginning of this thread? (The message,
not the fact that the board should say it. I don't think people should wait
for the board to say/do everything.) That's nicely worded and it would have
been much more appropriate than many of your other
The point I was trying to make was that HTML 5 (or more formally some
of the API's for javascript for accessing local storage), among other
things, enables offline use of web applications.
This sounds both interesting and dangerous. Maybe it would let you
explicitly install a
See http://www.fsf.org/news/2009-07-mscp-mono for details.
That article is a load of crap, a package of half truths.
You are entitled to your opinion, but I think you're wrong.
I invite people to read it and judge for themselves.
Some of the points in the article -- not all -- deal with
It is not a matter of ostracizing anyone. We are glad that they use
GNOME, but we must not say we are entirely happy about them as long as
they contain non-free programs.
But we are closely associated with these organizations. (Your original email
said we should make
This discussion is not contributing to the original point of this email
thread - the strategic goals for GNOME.
I agree with you, but those who are attacked in the list have a right
to respond to defend themselves, and sometimes it is necessary. In
this case the FSF was attacked.
Is that something we (W3C) should take up?
How about if we talk about it off the list?
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The proposed speaker guidelines have a serious problem. Since they
prohibit anything that makes someone uncomfortable, regardless of why,
and since criticism of one's actions tends to make many people
uncomfortable, the consequence is to prohibit serious criticism of any
practice that is followed
Richard, I'm fairly certain these guidelines are more about not making
the audience uncomfortable when prominent speakers make sexist
remarks, or remarks critical of religion,
If the policy is clearly limited to such activities and comparable
ones, I would not object to it. I did not
It seems that your perception of my speech is very different from what
I said.
What made C# users uncomfortable was not this criticism about patents,
it was the way it was presented as an almost personal attack towards
mono developers.
It wasn't presented that way by me. I did not
This announcement mentions only open source, not free software. A
person learning about GNOME from this announcement would think it is a
supporter of the open source camp. Nothing in the announcement would
inform the person that the free software movement exists and that
GNOME is connected with
Here is a question for the candidates.
To advance to the goal of freedom for software users, we need to
develop good free software, and we need to teach people to value and
demand the freedom that free software offers them. We need to advance
at the practical level and at the philosophical
Your message made me aware of the GNOME Ambassadors program, so I read
the page http://live.gnome.org/Ambassadors to learn about it.
There is a subtle but deep difference between the goal stated in that
page, To ... teach people the advantages of using a free desktop,
and teaching them the idea
People and corporations will not choose Free Software (or Open Source,
or any derivative flavour) because it's free.
Stating that as a broad, universal claim goes against the facts.
Many people have already chosen free software precisely for the sake
of freedom. So have some national and
I would think it being fine to say, GNOME is:
- Linux kernel
- D-Bus
- NetworkManager/BlueZ/PolicyKit/udisks/upower
- X11
all the way to GTK+/Clutter combination and apps
It seems like stretching things that a GUI desktop
includes all the lower level facilities it runs on.
Also, if Linux is part of GNOME, that would imply it is part of GNU.
I don't think we want to imply that conclusion.
I guess that you misunderstood my original mail.
That is possible.
We need to be able to
drain the swamp,
I tried to vote, but it did not work, because the page for selecting
candidates requires Javascript. I keep Javascript disabled because
most Javascript programs are nonfree and I don't want them in my
machine. (See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.html.)
I looked at the page
Hm. If we do not get that issue resolved quickly enough, feel free to
send your vote to electi...@gnome.org. But then (obviously) at least one
person in (at least) the elections committee will know who you have
voted for.
Just to make sure, I did that.
Oh, so that's based on the code that I wrote a few years ago? If that's
the case, let's say it's GPLv2+ too :-)
Can we use GPLv3+? That would set a good example for developers
of other programs.
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I'll add that people writing KDE or GNOME don't push for a
GNOME/GNU/Linux, or even GNOME/X.org/GNU/Linux. Just mentioning
GNU/Linux is disingenious.
See gnu.org/gnu/gnu-linux-faq.html#many.
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The GNOME speaker guidelines were at least partly a reaction to my
Saint IGNUcius comedy routine. So if I don't have a beef with these
guidelines, why should anyone else?
I am proud of my Saint IGNUcius routine. Thousands of people have
laughed at it. The routine makes fun of people,
Sorry to say that but now I do feel offended. You're projecting your
thoughts and claiming them to be my words.
Welcome to the club.
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Driving half of the human race out of that community
though behaviour they find obnoxious and threatening
That would be a very bad thing, and I am not doing that.
My Saint IGNUcius routine is not driving anyone out of the free
software movement. Negative reactions have been rare, and I
We should try to get some more GNOME people into the organization team.
It might be generally useful to do something to help GNOME
contributors meet up based on where they live. We do so much in
cyberspace, in which a person's geographical location is irrelevant,
that come the day when
The idea is simple (but long and complex to implement). I would love
to have a site addons.gnome.org, so we can have nice database with
plugins and other addons for desktop apps. The idea would be to
borrow ideas from the addons site of mozilla and it should support
different
Tomeu, is the source of addons.mozilla.org or activities.sugarlabs.org
publicly available under an open source license? If so, could you
point me out to it?
For our use, being open source is not sufficient.
We would need it to be available under a free software license.
Most open
Which applications are involved? There are some desktop apps that are
LGPL'd or even [X11'd], for which non-free addons could legally be
developed.
In those cases, nonfree addons would be lawful, but they are still
wrong. So we should make sure not to include them in any list.
It's not really a question of morality, how would we prevent a user
from installing both a GPL and a non-OSI plugin for Tomboy at the same
time?
As someone already pointed out, we don't aim to _stop_ users from
installing whatever they wish. The question at hand is what we
_suggest_
It does appear that the inclusion of open and not free packages in
GNOME is an exception, not rule.
If a program is not free, it cannot be in GNOME. Its inclusion would
be a serious mistake.
Has there been such a mistake? The cases you cite don't show any.
On my system out of 109
It would be very useful for discussions like these if there were
a list of licenses which are open source but not free software,
I agree that the list would be useful for some things. However, I
would not want to publish it on gnu.org; that could undermine our main
message about those
If giving the person a prize is what causes the problem,
we could still invite people in those countries to enter,
but inform them it won't be possible to give them the prize
if they win. They would still get the honor of winning.
It is better than excluding them.
--
Richard Stallman
explanation,
and http://www.gnu.org/gnu/the-gnu-project.html for background.
Making the users of GNU aware that they're using GNU is good for
all GNU packages, including GNOME.
--
Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org, www.gnu.org
Since we're talking about GNOME and accessibility, it would be useful
to include Chris Hofstader, the GNU access technology coordinator,
c...@gnu.org. He is trying to find resources for work on GNOME
accessibility.
--
Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA
Please do note that GNOME is a part of the GNU Project.
Describing it as open source, while not false,
is partly misleading.
--
Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org, www.gnu.org
for
activities, and that's fine if you can do it, but _aiming_ for that
does tend to alter the message. Our message is, You deserve
freedom, and it should not be replaced with Do what business will
support.
--
Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
term. We will slowly adopt it to our culture about
FREEDOM word to our community.
Baik sekali, terima kasih. Kebebasan pengguna perlu bantuan anda
dengan bantuan kami.
--
Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org, www.gnu.org
needs your help along
with our help.
--
Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org, www.gnu.org
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and it should work with Javascript disabled.
--
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org, www.gnu.org
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and the principles they stand for.
--
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org, www.gnu.org
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Material that teaches something (such as how to use GNOME) or serves
for reference (such as, about GNOME) should be released under the GFDL.
That's GNU's license standard for documentation.
Other material could be released under any CC license.
--
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software
to be put into a GNU manual should be under
the GFDL. It could be a dual license GFDL | CC-BY-SA.
--
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org, www.gnu.org
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It seems to me that GNOME deserves equal treatment with KDE as regards
any sort of registration for the event. Whatever system is being used
could be put on another machine, and some pages could be changed,
so that it would mention GNOME and KDE equally.
--
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free
.
Shall we talk with Bradley together to straighten it out?
--
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org, www.gnu.org
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http
because I recommend that we not describe
potentially useful works of software documentation works as content.
That term denigrates the works.
See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html@Content for the
reason.)
--
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
I believe the aforementioned URL is incorrect. The correct one would be
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Content.
You are right. I didn't see I typed @ instead of #.
--
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
Please verify that the sites you choose will work without running
any nonfree Javascript code. Otherwise, GNOME will be pushing
users to run nonfree software.
--
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org, www.gnu.org
Skype: No way
to the rules.
The FSF's service list rules say that the service provider must not
make an unsollicted offer, to people contacting it through the list,
of service on any proprietary software.
--
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org
considerable.
Referring to GNOME as an operating system will suggest it is an
alternative to other systems, such as in particular GNU. That's going
to cause conflicts which there is no practical reason to have.
--
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA
the right way to decide them; but occasionally
a technical decision has broader or deeper implications.
--
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org, www.gnu.org
Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
Use free telephony
a kernel. I think you're
talking about the GNU system but calling it Linux.
That's a big misunderstanding. GNOME has no special relationship
with Linux but does have one with the GNU system (see gnome.org).
--
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
ask for copyright assignments, they may be seeking
to use your code in proprietary software. Here's an article
that suggests what to look for when thinking about that question.
http://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/assigning-copyright.
--
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin
I'd like to ask the candidates this question:
* What do you think GNOME should do to help promote the ideals of free
software, beyond being composed of free programs.
--
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org, www.gnu.org
Skype
carefully before using an Internet service, and
should consult their consciences before developing one. So it would
be wise to avoid terms such as cloud computing that encourage making
a blanket decision, without considering the issues of each case.
--
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software
to
practical issues. I ask the candidates to turn their attention for a
moment to how to make the most out of our advantage.
--
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org, www.gnu.org
Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software
this advantage and increase
it?
--
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org, www.gnu.org
Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
Use free telephony http://directory.fsf.org/category/tel
who will, in five years, choose GNOME because they want the
freedom that proprietary rivals will never give them?
--
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org, www.gnu.org
Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
Use
. That's true, but my point is
different. My point is that we need to talk about our inherent
_ethical_ advantage that we respect users' freedom.
See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/compromise.html.
--
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org
for past contributions, it should be required ASAP
for the future. And previou contributors should be asked to agree to
it for their past postings.
--
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org www.gnu.org
Skype: No way! That's nonfree
format for the GNOME Foundation blogs, why not
change the style on the GNOME Foundation's blog server?
If users want to see different formats, can't they do that
by customizing their browsers? If free browsers don't support that,
and users want it, shouldn't it be implemented there?
--
Dr Richard
Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org www.gnu.org
Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
Use free telephony http://directory.fsf.org/category/tel/
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of the difference between free software and open
source.
--
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org www.gnu.org
Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
Use free telephony http://directory.fsf.org/category/tel
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