On Thu, Mar 02, 2017 at 03:17:51PM +0100, Nomen Nescio wrote: > Alfred M. Szmidt said: > > > That is lack of police at the GNU project. > > > > That is a good thing. > > It's only a good thing when police are not needed. > > I also think Jean Louis was using "police" loosely, perhaps to also > mean lack of /legislators/ using feedback to make adjustments when > shit happens. No one expected a GNU project to conduct itself in such > a freedom-hostile manner, so the lack of legal framework to handle > this is understandable.
It was expected to be "policy", not police. The legislator is the GNU project, and there are already good references like GNU maintainter manual, but who can think of anything that happens in future. Under the Speech section, it says, one should not promote the other companies. Reference: https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/maintain.html#Interviews-and-Speeches "Please don’t include advertisements or plugs for any company, product or service. Even if the product would meet the standards for the FSF to endorse it, an ad for it is out of place in a presentation about a GNU package. Likewise, please don’t include company slogans. Mention a company only when called for by the subject matter. " That should apply to hosting, such as Cloudflare, or Github, as they are hosting for their own purposes and means. Users' attention is to move to advertising, to non-free software, they will use non-free javascript, and be faced with advertising to iPhone such as non-free hardware. That it opposite to teaching the users about free software. Unspoken of the misleading "open source" references on such websites. Well that similar policy (not police) shall be adopted for official GNU software, and again, it is simply easiest to have a mirror of the software on GNU websites, regardless where is the original website located. I don't see really the problem to mirror or copy prominently the information about software on GNU website, as just the minority of GNU software is hosted elsewhere. Jean Louis
