Re: Thanks, and a Brief Survey

[john palmieri <john j5 palmieri gmail com>]

On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 7:02 AM, Philip Van Hoof <pvanhoof gnome org> wrote:

On Fri, 2010-01-15 at 02:01 -0800, Lefty (石鏡 ) wrote:

Hi Lefty,

> Thanks to Bruno and the rest of the Membership team. It pleases me for
> some reason to be on the same list of new members as my friend, Jim
> Vasile.

> On a different matter, I am currently conducting a brief (< 5 minute)
> survey on attitudes and viewpoints on FLOSS and proprietary software
> and I invite all to participate in it. We have on the order to 400
> respondents so far, but I’d like to get as broad a level of coverage
> as possible.

Thanks a lot for taking the time to conduct these surveys!

The results are more than enlightening to me. The surveys definitely are
useful and insightful.

They sharply illustrate that open source developers are far more
pragmatic than certain people in the audience would like us to be.

Thanks for relegating the opposing view to "certain people".  It is certainly intelectually honest of you to put them in all in the same bucket and then crap in it.  As for the survey, we have always known GNOME developers to be pretty practical and pragmatic as evidenced by the selection the LGPL for most of our code.  The surveys in question have been adjenda driven as a need to de-legitimize the GPL and Free Software in general and RMSs manifesto in particular.  While not many of us would say we 100% follow every word that comes out of RMSs mouth, many of us still believe in the notion behind Free Software as a better, and yes more moral way to develop.

It is sad thet the FOSS economy is still in its infancy and can not support all of the developers out there yet but that is one of the goals.  So, when a survey asks, is proprietary software immoral,  illegitimate or antisocial, you are really asking if people who use or develop proprietary software are immoral,  illegitimate or antisocial.  It isn't really an interesting question.

The original issue that brought this all up is whether GNOME should drop people from the planet for endorsing proprietary applications.  I don't think there was anyone in any position to do so who agreed (short of some coordinated advertising campaign).  I however do agree that GNOME itself should not help promote proprietary software if part of our goal is to spread FOSS software.  That means simply that we don't official endorse any proprietary software other than to say it uses GNOME technologies, or a howto get GNOME technology working under some piece of software (Windows, VMWare, etc.).  We should never provide links to download proprietary software on official, non-aggregated sites (including the wiki) unless there are no other equivalent FOSS alternatives.  Unfortunately the survey doesn't really address that, nor could it.

--
John (J5) Palmieri