Re: Revamped Gnome.org

[Richard Hoelscher <richardhoelscher gmail com>]

On 9/18/05, J.B. Nicholson-Owens <jbn forestfield org> wrote:

I thought that GNOME was the official desktop of the GNU Project, and thus had
to do with the free software movement, not the open source movement.  Looking at
the Wikipedia reference you included, I see that GNOME actually predates the
coining of the term "open source" and the Open Source Initiative (GNOME started
in August 1997, the OSI and "open source" in February 1998).

 

Poh-tate-ohs and pogh-ta-toes. The vast majority of developers on GNOME think of themselves as part of the kick-ass-software movement.... People infatuated with the stop energy of free vs open source debate tend to wind up making dead-end projects or P2P (avast, this means "pirate to pirate!") tools at SourceForge.
 

The GNU Project seems interested in getting credit for their work and the
community they started; from
<http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html>:

> We are not against the Open Source movement, but we don't want to be lumped
> in with them. We acknowledge that they have contributed to our community, but
> we created this community, and we want people to know this. We want people to
> associate our achievements with our values and our philosophy, not with
> theirs. We want to be heard, not obscured behind a group with different
> views. To prevent people from thinking we are part of them, we take pains to
> avoid using the word ``open'' to describe free software, or its contrary,
> ``closed'', in talking about non-free software.

 

Long story short, for the purpose of front-page use, I'm all in favor of GNOME being described as "open source" software, not "Open Source", "Free Software" or "Open-Source Free Software". Use it as an adjective to get the point across that this is a community of good people that develop software together, without the emotional baggage. If they really want to learn more, they can, but there's no reason to shovel it onto the front page.

 

This sort of thing has been discussed many times before. For example, try looking for RMS posts on foundation-list in the past few years.

 

-Richard Hoelscher

http://rahga.com/svg/