Re: Questions for the board election candidates

[Richard Stallman <rms gnu org>]

How does each candidate propose to make use of GNOME and its
communication to build support in the user community for free software
and the freedom it provides?


The free software movement practices pragmatic idealism.  Our ideal is
freedom for those who use software.  We say that all programs should
be free, and our practical goal is to bring that about.

The open source camp is pragmatic too, but mostly not idealistic.  The
promoters of open source generally don't aim to make all programs open
source.  They recommend a certain development methodology, presenting
it as a practical issue and not as an ethical requisite.

You could imagine someone saying "ethically, all code should be open
source", but that's not the views of the open source camp.

The idea of the GNU system follows from the free software movement's
ideals.  If you want to escape from nonfree software, pragmatically
you need a free system to escape to.  It has to be 100% free software
in order to do the job; 99% free software doesn't get you all the way
out.

That's why we launched GNOME.  In 1998, KDE was free software, but in
order to use it, one had to use nonfree Qt as well.  Thus, KDE was
leading to a system that couldn't be 100% free software.  We had to do
something about that, and what we did is GNOME.

(Nowadays Qt is free software, so KDE doesn't have this problem any
more.  Part of why Qt is free software is that GNOME put pressure on
the developers to make it free.)

GNOME's usefulness as a software package is independent of how we talk
about it.  However, the use of GNOME provides an opportunity to
educate the users about this issue, in philosophical and political
terms -- to teach them the idealism of the free software movement.

Thus, my question: how does each candidate propose to make use of
GNOME and its communication to build support in the user community for
free software and the freedom it provides?

--
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org  www.gnu.org
Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
  Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call