Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap

[Richard Stallman <rms gnu org>]

    While freedom is an important factor in life, it is not the only
    defining factor for quality of life. At the end of the day, most of us
    want a certain level of comfort too.

    We need a strong vision and strategy to become best of breed in
    software. Merely being free will only please the ascetic who can live of
    mental joy,

I don't think anyone suggested that we should not bother trying to
make GNOME convenient to use.  To remember freedom as a value
does not imply forgetting about practical convenience.

But we don't need to make an effort to remind ourselves to value the
practical qualities of our software, because there is no chance we
would forget that.  The general tendency in the world around us is to
judge software on practical qualities alone.  We as users appreciate
convenience as well as freedom.  We could hardly forget to think about
the practical qualities.

The values that programmers often forget are the ethical values such
as freedom.  These are the ones that go against the usual current.  So
these are the ones we need to make efforts to remind ourselves about.

		but it will never capture a significant market, which in the
    end just means that you'll slowly become irrelevant.

Is your standard of relevance based solely on "market" success?

Only a few percent of computer users run the GNU/Linux system, and
even fewer run BSD.  Some people would say this is not "a significant
market".  But these systems are the only ways to use a computer and
have freedom, and that makes them very relevant for a different set of
values.