Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap

[Richard Stallman <rms gnu org>]

    If the freedom offered needs to be taught and be appreciated, there is a 
    fundamentally flaw with that. True freedom should be obvious once it is 
    tasted.

If we had made that our criterion, it would have led us to reject many
past advances in our understanding of human rights.  Society generally
needs to be educated to understand the need for a freedom which has
not been generally accepted in the past.  Pick almost any advance in
human rights, and you'll see that it required educating people who had
been taught to consider it absurd.

We can see this today, when we look at the campaign to give gay
couples equal rights, and the campaign for abortion rights, which has
not been won globally.  Even freedom of speech was not obvious, and
there are still people who don't get it.

This is even more true for ideas of freedom that are inconvenient for
the large corporations that dominate most of the media.  They can use
their power to discourage the sort of discussion through which people
could start to endorse those ideas of freedom.  This makes it even
more necessary for us to work to encourage that discussion.