I dont see how I can agree that entering in direct competition
with anyone who wants to make a dollar from a software solution is
going to bring us to that long-term goal.
The GNU Project has a history of competing successfully with
proprietary software. For instance, GCC competed directly with
non-free C compilers, and has done quite well against them. And the
GNU operating system as a whole has done pretty well against Unix.
Any free IDE almost surely competes directly with non-free IDEs, but
that is no reason to give up developing them, and I am confident our
community will not.
Frankly, the company I formerly worked for,
chose gtk+ for its C object orented model, and it was possible because
of the LGPL licence.
I decided to use the LGPL for the basic GNOME libraries, and thus
permit non-free programs to support GNOME, so that GNOME could compete
better against KDE. Competing with KDE was crucial for our freedom in
1997 because KDE depends on a library, Qt, which was non-free back
then.
Whether to allow use of Glade in non-free software is a separate
question. Would allowing non-free programs to use Glade give a major
advance to the free software community?
I won't say that is impossible, but no one has made a case that it is
likely. What you said in your message is somewhat vague and doesn't
make a clear argument.
I dont feel offended that someone else may write a frontend that
uses libgladeui and makes money on 6 years or so of my own work,
While you may be most concerned with who makes how much money, I'm
more concerned with advancing our freedom.
Free software is a matter of freedom. Non-free software denies the
users' freedom. To restore this freedom we need to replace the
proprietary software with free software. That's the reason why we
developed GNU, and GNOME in particular. See gnu.org/philosophy.
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