Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[Philip Van Hoof <spam pvanhoof be>]

On Fri, 2009-12-11 at 10:12 -0500, Richard Stallman wrote:

> But GNOME is part of the GNU Project, and it ought to support the free 
> software movement. The most minimal support for the free software movement
> is to refrain from going directly against it; that is, to avoid presenting
> proprietary software as legitimate.

I understand your position. I think you might not understand the
position of a lot of GNOME foundation members and contributors.

Their position isn't necessarily compatible with your position that
GNOME should "avoid presenting proprietary software as legitimate".

The way I see it is that most members want GNOME to stay out of that
philosophic discussion. Although GNOME usually advises to "work
upstream" and to "do things opensource when possible, as much as
possible". This is just a personal point of view, of course.

You, as one of the key FSF people, appear to be keen[1] on enforcing a
strict policy on how GNU's member-projects should behave. So ...

I propose to have a vote on GNOME's membership to the GNU project.

> I think Planet GNOME should have a rule to this effect. 

I think it's clear that I disagree. Philosophically.

> There are many ways to implement such a rule, of which "block the 
> whole blog" is about the toughest one we might consider.  I'd suggest
> rather to try a mild approach; I'm sure that can do the job.

Let's first get a consensus from our members on GNOME's status as being
or not being a well-behaving GNU project, or having its own identity.


Cheers,

Philip


[1] You write "minimal support". "Minimal" to me means: either you do
    this, or you're out. Feel free to correct me.

-- 
Philip Van Hoof, freelance software developer
home: me at pvanhoof dot be 
gnome: pvanhoof at gnome dot org 
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