Dne 21. 10. 19 v 17:08 Mark Wielaard napsal(a): > In practice GNU already is mostly a bottom-up organization, where the > GNU hackers that do the actual work shape the project, but it would be > nice to make it more formally so.
The problem with this approach is the risk of hostile takeover. There are corporations (e.g. those that profit from proprietary software/cloud) or governments of countries like China, Russia or USA (with their secret services and agencies) that have almost unlimited (from our point of view) financial and developers resources – which allows them to bend such organization according to their needs. In this context, it is also important to mention, that it is not required to „agree with the GNU Project's free software principles, its goals or its policies to participate in the GNU Project“ <https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2019-10/msg00313.html> i.e. there is no guarantee that contributors are faithful to free software ideas and that they always work for the benefit of users and their freedom. So if this is to have a chance of success, there must be a rigid (immutable) constitution which guarantees the principles in the long term. (Sure, immutability has its pitfalls, but if the principles are to change, it is necessary to come up with a new name – the words like free software, FSF or GNU must not be reused for a different purpose). We have the GNU Manifesto <https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html> and the Free Software Definition <https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html>. Maybe they should be transformed into a constitutional document (while retaining the original meaning, of course). Franta _______________________________________________ gnu-misc-discuss mailing list gnu-misc-discuss@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
