Re: GNOME: lack of strategic roadmap

[Richard Stallman <rms gnu org>]

If people are going to use Facebook, they should access it with free software.
And it is useful for GNOME to do a good job of that.

At the same time, using Facebook is a harmful practice.  It gives a
misleading impression of privacy, it has close ties with the CIA and
probably lets the CIA look at everything people upload.  (See
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook.)  It uses
Flash format for video, which is harmful to free software.  Some of
its services are SaaS, which takes away control of your computing
just as proprietary software does.

So if GNOME is to provide a special feature for using Facebook, it
should also warn people that they shouldn't trust Facebook with
anything sensitive.  It should make sure Gnash is installed for
playing Flash, rather than lead people to install non-free Adobe
software.  And it should not do anything to facilitate or encourage
use of the SaaS features of Facebook.

(Can anyone tell me what what an "empathy account" does and what an
f-spot export configuration does?)

It is also important to give equally good support to other systems
people can use for telling each other about events; for instance,
social networking sites of the free software community, and
peer-to-peer methods.  This way, GNOME won't favor Facebook over those
other methods.