Re: Questions to answer

["Richard M. Stallman" <rms gnu org>]

    I would be happy to help out.  As Jonathan mentions, Murray and I have
    been sorting through some of the issues on live.gnome.org by putting
    together an Interface Specification that is hopefully useful to ISV's

Does "ISV" stand for "Independent Software Vendor"?  If so, the term
is often misleading, because the most important developers of GNOME
applications--those developing free software--are mostly not vendors.

Consider, for instance, the GIMP developers.  Their program works with
GNOME, but project is not a vendor.  GNU Emacs now has GTK+ support,
but we Emacs developers are not a vendor.

Every time a standard describes the projects that develop or
distribute software as "vendors", that has the effect of denying the
existence of volunteer projects.  So please, let's use a different
term for GNOME application developers in general, one which fits all
of them, and particularly fits our own community.  Perhaps we could
refer to them as GNOME Application Developers (GADs), or more
generally, Independent Software Developers (ISDs).

See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Vendor
for reference.