Re: two questions for candidates

["Luis Villa" <luis tieguy org>]

On Nov 27, 2007 7:20 AM, Gregory Leblanc
<headmaster albus dumbledore gmail com> wrote:
> On Nov 26, 2007 2:54 PM, Luis Villa <luis tieguy org> wrote:
> > On Nov 26, 2007 10:28 AM, Richard Stallman <rms gnu org> wrote:
> [snip]
> > > 2. How do you think the GNOME Foundation should support the Free
> > > Software Movement in general?
> >
> [snip]
> >
> > 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 :)
>
> I'm not quite clear on what you mean here, Luis.  Can you suggest some
> links that I might peruse that would describe what you mean by 'user
> autonomy' and why source code access is insufficient to guarantee it?

Keep an eye on my blog; essay on it going up in the next 24-48 hours.
But you can get some flavor of it from previous posts:

http://tieguy.org/blog/category/openservice/

and from http://live.gnome.org/FreeOpenServicesDefinition

Nutshell: if a web service gives you source, but keeps your data and
identity locked up, you have very little choice- very little autonomy-
unlike the choice/autonomy you'd have if you were running
locally-managed software and had the source.

Luis