Re: Questions

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

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.

Fair questions.

1) How to help GNOME promote the 'cause of software freedom'

    To my mind GNOME as a project is doing an admirable job at an
    extremely important way of promoting free and open software.  We
    are _writing_ it.  Contributors to GNOME are building a platform
    of solid, fully featured code that can act as an ambassador to
    the world of proprietary development.  It offers a proof by
    existence that free software can be used in a production
    setting.  Just as your work on emacs and other projects has.

    However,  GNOME can not write all required software itself.
    Other projects and proprietary development will always be
    necessary.  To my mind another strength of GNOME and its
    libraries is that even proprietary code can use them.  This
    allows those developers to contribute indirectly via bug
    reports, and feature requests to strengthen a free platform.
    In some cases that proprietary code may eventually be freed in
    part because it is based on open libraries.  I'm waiting eagerly
    to see Gobe.

2) Relationship between GNOME and the whole GNU project

    The current relationship seems adequate and I see no sense in
    launching or contributing to divisive, productivity decimating
    debates that will take precious resources away from making GNOME
    better.  As I watch the fragmentation of the developer
    community into ever small chunks, be they religious differences
    (free vs open), platform differences (Gtk+ vs Qt), or language
    differences the only cause that seems to gain is Microsoft and
    all the other anti-free organisations than rail against GNOME
    and GNU and Linux and X and Apache and the myriad other
    contributors to our current tool-chest.

    Excluding or berating a potential contributor for calling their
    OS 'Linux' does not seem likely to expand the community, or make
    anyone happier.  Lets get some work done.