Re: Thanks, and a Brief Survey

["Lefty (石鏡 )" <lefty shugendo org>]

On 1/15/10 9:05 AM, "Philip Van Hoof" <pvanhoof gnome org> wrote:
> On Fri, 2010-01-15 at 08:58 -0800, Lefty ( 亢À ) wrote:
> 
> Like you say, the survey's data seems to suggest a broader "uptake"
> among the respondents for open source. I don't know but I'm inclined to
> believe that the consensus among the members is open source, not free
> software then.

I didn't put a discriminator on the survey to allow me to cross-tabulate
GNOME members; that was fairly deliberate at the time, I was looking for as
much of a community-wide response as I could get. In retrospect, I wish I'd
asked, though.

It may be better to look for data on this in a survey that is presented by
the Foundation Board to the members in a more official fashion, rather than
by me on my own. That said, if the Foundation would like me to conduct a
survey on that, or other matters, I'm more than happy to take the questions
and responses, etc., from them and implement it on SurveyMonkey. (Last time
I mentioned this, I think I was told that the Board had some survey system
on hand already; I don't know that we've used it so far...)

> Free software vs. open source isn't a matter of just picking words, in
> my opinion. I think we should get this right.

Well, I would have to say that the reason it's something to consider at this
point in time is that some of the terms seem to have gotten a little
"loaded" with additional meaning. That is to say, that if there's an
equivalence in people's minds between the phrases "favors free software" and
"thinks proprietary software is illegitimate" for example, that's a problem
in my view.