Re: New GNOME.Asia Summit website launched

[Frederic Muller <fredm gnome org>]

Dear Richard,

Thanks for the feedback, I launched the site on Sunday night at 3am and 
my phone line has been cut Monday morning at around 8am (they are 
"working" on the line...). While I've been hoping and fighting to get it 
back I finally had to resolve myself to go out and find a place with 
free Internet. I actually wanted to make changes (there was/are still a 
few other mistakes). And this is when my laptop fan died preventing my 
pc to start... we have a French expression for that which would 
translate into something like 'when it rains, it pours'.

So 3 days later I still have no convenient Internet connection, but a 
brand new fan landed in my laptop chassis. I'm catching up...

While I think you have a strong point about the missing message about 
GNOME and free software I believe a lot of people outside of the US (at 
least) use the expression 'Open Source' as a synonym of Free Software. I 
prefer to unite the potentially "2 communities" (assuming they are 
split). And I dislike FLOSS as a term: I read LOSS in it (the fully 
worded version is way too long for my taste as well). Since I'm writing 
some of the text on the site, I get to pick ;-)

Now I'll review your comments and make improvements. I would be happy to 
hear how you would advertise in 4/5 words the session where we're trying 
to encourage local IT services companies to embrace free software and 
show them that they can run a business around it?

So thanks a lot. I'll post on the list when changes are made.

Fred



On 03/23/2011 01:22 AM, Richard Stallman wrote:
> I looked at the home page.
>
> The sponsors get more screen area than GNOME.  This seems like an event
> to promote them more than an event to promote GNOME.
>
> The top line uses the word "monetize" -- a word that carries the worst
> fashion of today's usual mercenary attitude -- but says nothing about
> freedom.  It does say "free software", but in that context people are
> likely to suppose that "free" means "gratis", and there is nothing on
> the home page to tell them otherwise.
>
> There needs to be something on the home page that clearly refers
> to freedom and shows that "free" means "freedom".
>
> The way that I can think of is to have a graphic with various words
> for free: ziyou, jiyuu-na, tu do, swatantra, mukt, etc., as well as
> "free" itself.  (This method is somewhat trite, so it would be nice to
> think of something more creative.)
>
>
> I looked at Who Should Attend page.  It mentions 5 goals, and all
> those goals are good, but the most important goal -- freedom on your
> computer -- is missing.
>
> The page says "FLOSS" a few times, and "free and open source" once.
> To fully promote free software, it should always say "free/libre" or
> "free/swatantra".  Mentioning open source is a distraction here,
> so that term shouldn't be present.
>
>
> I looked at the speakers page.  I was glad to see that you're giving a
> talk about software freedom.  However, for each person who attends your
> talk, a thousand will view the home page.  We need to get the message
> of freedom into the home page so that thousands will see it.