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

[Magdalen Berns <m berns thismagpie com>]

> The same set up as what?

Something similar to IndieGoGo.

It does not need to be similar to indieGoGo. Let's review:

GNOME is a charity. IndiGoGo is a business. They do not have the same tax set up, no. As far as I am aware, they do not need to have the same tax set up either. GNOME does not need to make a profit.

> > AFAIK there's a difference between accepting money yourself and an
> > organization on your behalf. It might not be as easy as it appears.
>
> Tax wise it is a different form of expense. Whoever the treasurer is would
> have to clarify. With that said it seems that the treasurer for a charity
> of this size would have to be used to managing large sums of money from
> donations as well as paying salaries, freelancers and expenses as they
> already have to fill in tax forms every year.

I don't want to be harsh, but there's a known working solution vs
something that "probably will work".

I am 99.99% sure it would work but as I am not based in the US, I do not know how the tax system works for Californian charitable organisations, off hand. I will give you another example so you can see why what you suggest, doesn't make any real financial sense: 

GNOME volunteer contributors are sometimes put in a position which asks them to do consultancy work. I know this is so because I have been consulting Oracle who approached me with an awful lot of questions relating to the atk wrapper (and linux) recently. When they first approached me, I would have liked to have been in a position to say, "sure I can help you, but you need to speak to GNOME first so they can bill you for consultancy" because that would have been a reasonable way to ensure a company which may profit from this work would be urged to something back into the community, value our time and resources but for some unfathomable reason, GNOME has not taken a stance.

If we are not able to value our own time and resources, how can we expect anybody else to do that, for us? When would it ever be beneficial to the free software community for a charitable community resource (i.e. GNOME), to not know how to take money and allocate it to paying volunteers for their time every once in a while?

If we are not gain clarity from this list to confirm that this is not rocket since, soon then no problem. I will find out for myself, once I have found time to look into it (as long as some people here are able to show some amount of willing to get behind the idea in principle, that is) at the moment I am still trying to figure out whether enough people are on board with the idea itself at this stage, because that is not yet, clear.

> Instead of talking about what should not be done, I'd prefer if we
> > encourage something to be done.
>
>
> I will assume you are not talking to me here, since that is exactly what I
> am doing already.

I mean that instead of having a list of:
- don't link to Facebook
- don't link to Google+
- don't use IndieGoGo
- don't link to Twitter

I rather see how people can improve on spreading the idea and usage of
free software.

Are we making a choice between supporting free software and not using these things, now?

Also. for the record, I am not 100% sure, but I do not believe that twitter is an "offending" case. I only got a twitter account because the GNOME community encouraged me to do that. I trust that the community would not do that if twitter was in the practice of running non-free scripts on my browser. Please correct me if I am wrong about twitter though.

It seems FSF is too much about first restricting
ourselves to a group who pretty much only uses free software. Seems too
much "preaching to the choir".

Here you seem to be working on the assumption that everyone who uses GNOME's website is "the choir". A lot of people only get to find out about free or open source software because they arrive on websites like GNOME's and read about it which brings me back to the point I made earlier about GNOME being in the unique (and privileged), position of being able to set an example.

Have you considered the possibility that by networking on something like Facebook we might actually exclude those members of the community from participating in conversations that happen, on there? Should we shrug our shoulders to that, rather than seek ways to include everyone to all our sources of communication? Could we be inadvertently sacrificing some of our transparency there, too?

In this case there wasn't anything available, a decision was taken that
is not ideal, but best at that time.

I think we have all agreed that in that case about Builder. However this does not mean we need to throw our hands up and give up, altogether.

If you look at e.g. GNOME applications, loads of new applications have
been written over the years. The number of commits and authors have
stayed relatively the same. Looking at that per application the
maintenance is decreasing.

You wonder why the number of maintainers has decreased? I don't. It seems obvious to me.

What I do wonder, is whether we are doing anything to prevent that from continuing on. In other words, what you have put forward seems like yet another compelling reason for why we absolutely do need to look at how we can nurture these kinds of projects and their fundraising efforts whatever form they come in. We can do this by examining what infrastructure we already have available to support them with and how that might be developed on.Plenty of us are not getting paid for our time, here. Christian is not in an exceptional situation. Efforts like the builder campaign ought not to be exceptional when we consider that point, don't you think?

Builder is just one item to attract people to work on free software. I
think too much burden is put on this. The person wanting to make Builder
should also figure out a free software version to raise funds.

So the GNOME infrastructure can't figure that one out but Christian, an already overburdened volunteer who is trying to scape funds for his project, somehow can do it all by himself?  That makes absolutely no sense.

Then this list of things to solve might read:
- convince Google+ to use free software license in their _javascript_

Never going to happen.

 

- convince IndieGoGo to use free software license in their _javascript_

Never going to happen.

 

- create an alternative to IndieGoGo just for GNOME

Seems to have been done and definately could be developed by a team.

 

- create an alternative to IndieGoGo for everyone

Sounds more like a start-up than something of GNOME's concern.

 

> I don't see how having a banner which endorses an campaign automatically
> > leads to endorsing something else (the company making the campaign
> > possible). Maybe sometimes, but at the moment we link to Facebook,
> > Twitter and Google+ for IMO entirely logical and practical reasons.
> >
>
>  Social links are indeed, a tough call in a question like this. Off hand.
> twitter does not seem so terrible, but does GNOME actually gain anything
> from being on facebook to make it worth that, though?

I don't think it is a tough call at all. I agree with the idea of free
software. I don't like that turning into a list of things you cannot do.
With free software I still have non-free software running on my machine.

So do I and I don't think it makes a difference what individuals do or don't do, in the grand scheme of things. We are not talking about individuals in the GNOME Foundation, we are talking about the GNOME Foundation.

There's multiple ways to support and stand by the way of supporting free
software.

Regarding gaining anything: How would more people ever know about free
software if the only people we reach out to is free software people?

By the same token, I have to ask how can we reach to people about free software if our [GNOME's] practices alienate free software people?

Magdalen