Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap

[Alberto Ruiz <aruiz gnome org>]

2010/2/25 Richard Stallman <rms gnu org>:
> A. Try to make GNOME better in practical ways too.
>
> B. Teach him to appreciate freedom, so he will recognize that the
> proprietary programs are inherently inferior ethically.
>
> It makes sense to work on both of them in parallel, according
> to the opportunities that occur.
>
> This is where the open source discourse is weak.  It fails to do B.

Hi Richard,

I appreciate your contribution to the discussion.

however, point B is pretty much like saying that instead of coming up
with Copyleft you should have run for congress and change the whole
Intelectual Property policy for the US.

Fact is that some people have no choice, they study at university or
they work on a company where they cannot chose their platform. I
worked part time for 2 years on pushing a fully open source stack in
the university of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, and without a migration
path (that is, open source ports of apps and platforms to Windows and
equivalents to some needed components such as AutoCad), it was pretty
much imposible to execute. We did plan for education on the opensource
philosophy and tools (in fact right now they're running professional
capacitation for the open source stack), but it is still hard without
some technicals.

Sometimes you need bridges (or hacks) like the one you did with the
Copyright, to approach your goals effectively and without harming the
image of the movement you're trying to promote (if we deploy
opensource, and turns out as a hassle for everyone, even if they
understand the ethics behind the move, the reputation of the movement
is way harmed).

Computers are meant to solve people's problem, they have no mean for
themselves except for people like us, and I'd like to think that the
opensource community does not only cares about the license of their
source code, but the usefulness, ease of use and the universal access
that it can potentially bring.

-- 
Cheers,
Alberto Ruiz