Re: IRC channels in gnome development

[Alan Cox <alan lxorguk ukuu org uk>]

> Guys, for a sake of a sanity. I've been around gnome since pre 2.0
> times. And all times up to now we supposed that OSS is about
> democratic process, where programmers are not told buy big enterprise

News to me, and flagship projects like the Linux kernel run on the "Linus
is boss" model.

The freedom is more fundamental than that. Democracy and similar systems
are a workaround for the fact in the physical world I can't do

	cp -r ourcountry mycountry
	mv ourcountry/me mycountry/me

and continue

In Free Software you can, so if a bunch of people don't like the current
direction of Gnome they can get involved and change it from within, or
they can take a copy with them and work in parallel, either for bits of
or for all of the desktop.

Freedom to make the decision doesn't extend to freedom to make other
people do the work for you or listen to you and this does lead to new
branches and ideas being tried out - sometimes becoming the norm (eg the
egcs rebellion against gcc process became gcc 3)

Alan