Re: Questions

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Sat, Nov 16, 2002 at 09:52:24AM -0500, Richard Stallman wrote:
> I would like to ask the other candidates to say what they will do to
> help GNOME promote the cause of software freedom, and how they will
> help closer relations between GNOME and the whole GNU Project.

  My personal take is that as long as the set of GNOME libraries
are free software I don't feel the urge to spend too much time on
it. It's clearly not the most urgent point, so far all libraries
are LGPL or with X11 like licences. I would have to object putting
GPL only libraries in the core as this would make them unusable to
build commercial applications. We need large scale application to
really grow the community, some of them may be not free software,
too bad I won't use them, but they will have their role in pushing
the GNOME framework in places currently tied to Motif or Windows.
  To me the key point to convert people to free software is to
prove them that other alternatives are at their detriment. If they
don't release the source of their applications or the patches to
existing libraries, or disallow redistributions of those they are
alone maintaining them and have zero garantee that their code will
integrate with the framework at the next release. This is a strong
ecconomic lever which has a lot of weight to people otherwise
resisting to more philosophical principles.
  A lot of my users are using libxml2 and libxslt on Windows or
other non-free environments, they are not used initially to report
bugs or send patches, though a number of them learnt those community
building principle. The gain is that they have learnt about the Other
Way of building software (and I think they appreciate the good points)
and I got a lot of bug reports and patches which have improved the
libraries. In that specific case keeping the code portable to non-free
environments was beneficial.

  In a nutshell my answer to your question is:
    "Not much, I don't think the situation need to change."

Daniel

-- 
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veillard redhat com  | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
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