Re: Linking to non-free websites from gnome.org

[Jim Nelson <jim yorba org>]

I told myself I would not get involved in this subject, but I have to say a couple of things.

First, there's a lot of talk (here and the earlier thread) that loosely equivocates fundraising with crowdfunding.  They're not the same.  To tell a project that it should simply accept donations rather than use a crowdfunding platform is a false equivocation.  Crowdfunding's mixture of elements -- the presentation, the pitch of the vision, the element of a deadline, staggered donation levels and gifts -- is not replicated by publishing a "Donate!" banner.

Second, linking to a web site is not an automatic endorsement of its script licensing or the practices of its operator.  Lacking semantic operators for hyperlinks, context is everything.  Personally, I trust my readers to understand this.

-- Jim

On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 6:50 PM, meg ford <meg387 gmail com> wrote:

Hi Magdalen,

On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 8:40 PM, Magdalen Berns <m berns thismagpie com> wrote:

I think you have agreed with me on the wiki and the blog but seem to not realise that, for some strange reason. To clarify, I agreed that individuals should be able to make their own choices for how they blog and pointed out that the wiki and would be too difficult to regulate than is practical. Really, the point here is that the core policy chat is referring to what GNOME, the organisation should endorse. The reason I would have to disagree with you that a policy on something like that is not a waste of time and resources is because some of the community feel like that GNOME as a "brand" represents a certain set of principles and that it may send out the wrong message to the general public for GNOME to be seen to be advocating or endorsing the use of non-free software by casually treating non-free links like they're the same as free ones.

I understood you to be talking about labeling links as non-free even on wiki pages and Planet GNOME. Were you only talking about links to fundraising pages?

Meg