Re: Moving foundation-list to discourse?

["Bradley M. Kuhn" <bkuhn ebb org>]

I am a GNOME Foundation Member *Emeritus*, so please don't take my opinion as
too important.

Olav Vitters wrote, back in August when proposing Discourse:
> Discourse is free software (including the Javascript) and the
> dependencies are also free software.

This is correct, "for the moment".  However, Discourse is somewhat of a
monoculture project, controlled by one company, and has some troubling
similarities to MongoDB in this regard.  I encourage everyone in the GNOME
Foundation read Discourse's CLA [0] (which is a Google Doc and likely
requires non-free Javascript to sign, although not to read), and decide if
the GNOME Foundation should be comfortable relying on as critical
infrastructure for a project that has this sort of non-community-oriented
licensing and governance model.

Of course, Discourse, the software, may well be forked under GPL if
Discourse, the company, ever uses the CLA to make the canonical version into
proprietary software, but given the monoculture of the project development,
that might be unrealistic logistically and resource-wise.

Also, given that Discourse is both the name of the software and the name of
the company, GF will be de-facto promoting the company (and, by implication,
their business model) merely by using the software publicly.

  * * *

One of my favorite pieces of GNOME history that I was involved with was the
GNOME copyright assignment policy
<https://wiki.gnome.org/action/show/FoundationBoard/Resources/CopyrightAssignment>
, which I am proud to have helped create and draft.  I was so glad that GNOME
took a strong position against proprietary relicensing by for-profit
companies, as most copylefted project have historically not taken that kind
of stand.

So, I mainly just want to point out that Discourse *is* such a company.  Of
course, everyone of us -- even those that use 100% Free Software on our
machines -- probably use some copylefted software from a company that does
this kind of thing, so I don't think this issue should necessarily preclude
GNOME Foundation from choosing to officially rely on such software, but I
suggest the issue is at least worth discussing before the change is made.

I won't say more on this issue since I'm only a Member Emeritus; it's for the
members to decide this question.

Tobias Mueller  wrote:
> > I found the discourse mailing list mode to be inferior to a mailing list.

I admit I also agree with this, but I assumed (at least on my old behalf)
that I'm just an old dog who doesn't want to learn new tricks. :)

I admit that especially since becoming Emeritus, it's been easier for me to
check in with what GF is up to by quickly skimming through emails on this
list in my usual way, and I lament the change as it's likely to lead me to
"not check" at all because it won't be worth figuring out Discourse's email
interface to keep up with a project that I'm not actively working with.  But,
again, don't let the opinion of one Emeritus member stop you from needed
progress. :)


This is apropos of nothing, but I wanted to mention that I was on a plane
last week and I saw someone using GNOME.  Usually, when I'm on the plane
going to a tech conference, the person using GNOME is going to the same
conference as me.  Then, I saw they were just using LIbreOffice to work on
mundane business documents -- clearly stuff not related to the tech industry.
This was so wonderful to see and while I know that competing with Microsoft
and Apple for the desktop remains difficult and challenging, there are users
out there who aren't tech geeks using GNOME every day and getting real
introduction to software freedom thanks to the work you all do.  As I said in
my GUADEC keynote years ago, thank you all again for doing this work!


[0] CLA is at
    <https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSd7JzGhGR-B9pFrg2byt2tnRjMqJtpnA0Yktl4dwy0-4tGo8g/viewform>
    which is linked from <https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md>
--
Bradley M. Kuhn - he/him

Pls. support the charity where I work, Software Freedom Conservancy:
https://sfconservancy.org/supporter/