Re: two questions for candidates

["Luis Villa" <luis tieguy org>]

On Nov 26, 2007 10:28 AM, Richard Stallman <rms gnu org> wrote:
> 1. Would you change anything in the GNOME Foundation statement about
> OOXML?

I wish it were more explicit about how the Foundation feels that the
ODF folks have been undermining the standards process. It isn't
obvious to everyone that ODF shares much of the blame for the
politicization of the process, so the statements about that in the
statement are a little vague.

I suppose it could have been more aggressive about describing
Microsoft as a multiply-convicted monopolist, but everyone already
knows that; being more explicit about it would mostly have been
redundant.

Finally, I'd have liked it to have been more timely. I think Jeff is
right that it would not have changed the impact much (we'd still have
been flamed) but we'd have looked like we were doing it above board,
instead of trying to sneak behind anyone's back.

> 2. How do you think the GNOME Foundation should support the Free
> Software Movement in general?

I think the most pressing thing is that the Foundation and our
partners need to investigate (with SFLC's help) the GPL v3, and decide
whether or not to move forward on that. I've been involved with v3 for
a long time now, and hopefully can help coordinate that effort.

More long-term, working with the online desktop folks, and hopefully
with many other interested parties, we need to reframe what software
freedom means in a network-centric world. It is now abundantly clear
to most everyone that source code access is frequently insufficient to
guarantee user autonomy; the question, then, is what additional (or
perhaps different) requirements will help our users maintain their
autonomy in the future. This is much bigger than GNOME, of course, but
it seems likely that we will be at the cutting edge of it, and so
we're going to have to deal with it whether we're the best forum for
it or not :)

Luis