Re: Questions

[George <jirka 5z com>]

On Mon, Nov 26, 2001 at 09:42:16PM +0000, Sander Vesik wrote:
> >     We need to keep chipping away at the dam, not painting slogans on it.
> > 
> > Painting slogans doesn't affect the dam directly, but it is the way to
> > convince more people to attack it.  Indirectly, it does a vital job.
> > 
> > To succeed, we have to do both.  If all we did were talk about
> > political issues and not write software, we would get nowhere.  But if
> > we did not talk about political issues, we would lose track of the
> > goal--we would get somewhere, but not there.
> > 
> 
> What if there isn't a 'political goal'? In that case we would not arrive
> at 'there' but 'pseudo-there' which might not resemble the place we wanted
> to go to at all. Thus the existence of the political goal shoul dfirst be
> firmly established.

Also any political goal should be firmly based on practical uses.  Else it is
purely arbitrary.  So this means that any goal is a practical one.  We should
promote free software because free software is a better (from a practical
point of view) way for the software community to work.  Which I believe it
clearly is.

In any case the foundation board is not about power or decision making.  It
is about lots of administrative voodoo as far as I'm told.  So uncompromising
positions on side issues will just make things not work.  Any issues of
contention are always resolved on the mailing lists by 'the GNOME public at
large' anyway.  So I suggest if Richard wants to contribute to those that
he join in those discussions.  That is the place for discussion political
goals and their effect on the project.  To state an example would be the
recent hooplah over mentioning non-free software in the gnome summaries and
the gnome website.  Such a decision should not be one that the board makes,
or even has to discuss.

Now this post is WAAAAAAAAAY to serious for my taste.  So:

PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFTGAGAGAGAGAGAPFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFT
(imagine stupid faces accompanying the above sound)

Now, that's a little better.

George

-- 
George <jirka 5z com>
   I killed the cat.   -- Sid Vicious