Re: Pure?

[Alex Hudson <home alexhudson com>]

On Sat, 2005-12-10 at 20:18 +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> How much do you think 'pure' resonates with, say, my Mum? Let's start from
> the top: She doesn't understand or care about software freedom, and getting
> her to use GNOME should not depend on that understanding. So, 'pure' as a
> concept isn't that useful.

As applied to "freedom" you're probably right - _however_, I think the
idea does potentially have marketing value.

We have a market where lots of people are delivering different versions
of GNOME - some very similar to the baseline software, some slightly
different. I'm sure we can all name UI changes that are made, from
artwork to larger functional changes, and that is something which is
pretty incompatible with the traditional idea of resale (the idea of
trade marks, for example, doesn't work as well in this scenario - e.g.,
Firefox is free software, but they don't let people distribute it as
such and keep the brand, which I think is a mistake).

It's also something that we probably don't want to particularly
discourage, since GNOME is Free Software. But, there is certainly an
idea of what is 'GNOME', which is the ultimately pure version, and those
versions that are modified and redistributed. 

I guess this is actually veering towards what Luis wrote on the GNOME
3.0 page wrt. Goals and Organisation (the standardisation stuff). 

Cheers,

Alex.