Excuse me, do GNU actually have precedents when the âstubborn governanceâ was proved to be needed to keep things free?
Readline, Objective-C backend, not allowing propietery hackery with GCC, GPLv3 and Tivioization, Emacs and plugins, come to mind. Fighting non-free software is always a uphill battle. IIRC, @[email protected] and Co. were initially going to reserve âGuixâ for package manager only, while calling the system distribution âGNUâ â simply âthe GNUâ: they presented it as âGNUâ at GHM and FOSDEM, published the first alpha releases of âGNUâ, and even the /gnu/ hierarchy is a remnant of that intention. The first alpha of GNU was already published back in the 1997. Being made that way, despite all the best intentions they had, it would be obviously perceived as a statement âwe are the proper and pureblood GNU, while Debian and other GNU distributions are impostorsâ, so RMS, of course, strongly opposed that. How such an issue would be supposed to be resolved with a ânon-stubbornâ governance? To understand a opposition, one needs to know the why. Taking your statement at face value as to what might have been said, that is, calling other free systems for "lesser systems" would be unfriendly and unkind, so why do that? That in it self would be a good reason to strongly object to such a statement since it would alienate people working on other free systems. But now knowing the precise words used, making any fair analysis of the decision is hard, and a simply way to find a false reasoning is to call it "stubborn" or similar.
