The inclusion of Flash, Silverlight, etc is not a GNOME thing per se
but more of a distribution decision. In other words, GNOME does not
handle the decision of what other distributions choose to ship.
It is a fact that We don't control the decisions these distros make.
Nonetheless, we
* LWN.net agreement - status
o The GNOME Foundation received the legal agreement from the
lawyers and this has been shared this with LWN. Once this
is finalized, work with marketing can start.
My guess is that this will create opportunities
Your message made me aware of the GNOME Ambassadors program, so I read
the page http://live.gnome.org/Ambassadors to learn about it.
There is a subtle but deep difference between the goal stated in that
page, "To ... teach people the advantages of using a free desktop,"
and teaching them the idea
Here is a question for the candidates.
To advance to the goal of freedom for software users, we need to
develop good free software, and we need to teach people to value and
demand the freedom that free software offers them. We need to advance
at the practical level and at the philosophical level.
This announcement mentions only open source, not free software. A
person learning about GNOME from this announcement would think it is a
supporter of the open source camp. Nothing in the announcement would
inform the person that the free software movement exists and that
GNOME is connected with i
It seems that your perception of my speech is very different from what
I said.
What made C# users uncomfortable was not this criticism about patents,
it was the way it was presented as an almost personal attack towards
mono developers.
It wasn't presented that way by me. I did not cr
Richard, I'm fairly certain these guidelines are more about not making
the audience uncomfortable when prominent speakers make sexist
remarks, or remarks critical of religion,
If the policy is clearly limited to such activities and comparable
ones, I would not object to it. I did not
The proposed speaker guidelines have a serious problem. Since they
prohibit anything that makes someone uncomfortable, regardless of why,
and since criticism of one's actions tends to make many people
uncomfortable, the consequence is to prohibit serious criticism of any
practice that is followed
Is that something we (W3C) should take up?
How about if we talk about it off the list?
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This discussion is not contributing to the original point of this email
thread - the strategic goals for GNOME.
I agree with you, but those who are attacked in the list have a right
to respond to defend themselves, and sometimes it is necessary. In
this case the FSF was attacked.
__
> It is not a matter of ostracizing anyone. We are glad that they use
> GNOME, but we must not say we are entirely happy about them as long as
> they contain non-free programs.
>
But we are closely associated with these organizations. (Your original email
said we should ma
See http://www.fsf.org/news/2009-07-mscp-mono for details.
That article is a load of crap, a package of half truths.
You are entitled to your opinion, but I think you're wrong.
I invite people to read it and judge for themselves.
Some of the points in the article -- not all -- deal with
The point I was trying to make was that HTML 5 (or more formally some
of the API's for javascript for accessing local storage), among other
things, enables offline use of web applications.
This sounds both interesting and dangerous. Maybe it would let you
explicitly install a free
Why didn't you just say that at the beginning of this thread? (The message,
not the fact that the board should say it. I don't think people should wait
for the board to say/do everything.) That's nicely worded and it would have
been much more appropriate than many of your other post
C# the language, and the core .NET libraries are under a
far-from-ideal "Community Promise" patent license. Sadly, this patent
grant for the ideas embodied in those standards are made available by
Microsoft to full implementations of C# and those core class
libraries. But they
If GNOME is planning to operate servers, GNOME needs to consider
when it is good or bad to encourage people to use servers.
In the US, if you receive a subpoena to hand over data, you have the
opportunity to plead in court to quash or reduce the subpoena.
Success is not guaranteed; the court may i
I explained in Gran Canaria that supporting C# is useful but depending
on it is risky. Thus, developing programs such as Mono and DotGNU is
fine, but we should not write applications in C#. For explanation of
these points, see http://www.fsf.org/news/dont-depend-on-mono.
This is why GNOME should
Maemo/Moblin/MeeGo use GNOME and we are proud of that. Of course, we always
encourage organizations and projects to use more free software but we should
not ostracise them because they don't use 100% free software.
It is not a matter of ostracizing anyone. We are glad that they use
GN
I wrote:
> Let's not be in a rush to invite users to use servers -- even our own
> -- instead of their own computers. That is the wrong direction to go.
I chose those words carefully. They do not say we should eliminate
all servers; I don't think that. For some purposes, servers are th
Regarding Facebook's connections with the CIA, see
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook.
The Guardian is a major UK newspaper.
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GNOME needs a metric of "success". Years ago it was "10x10", which is
ridiculous today as it was when it was first proposed. But it reveals an
implicit assumption: "more users == success". We need a firm statement from
the foundation on this. Is it possible that "easier to use a
It seems to me there's a continuing need to 1) raise awareness about
GNOME, 2) raise money for GNOME, and 3) provide services around open
tools so users don't need to host their own servers, etc., to benefit
from services like Snowy, iFolder, etc.
Let's not be in a rush to invite u
The combination of technologies going under the name "HTML 5" have
made/are making web technology based applications finally competitive
with those built using conventional toolkits such as Qt, GTK+, and the
Windows and Mac equivalents.
If everything gets done inside or through
Proposed project vision: Hidden in plain sight: Everyone using GNOME,
no-one noticing
This proposed goal might be ill-advised, because it's very good to be
noticed if one do something good. Especially for a project that needs
to attract support from people.
We probably could have had
It would make more sense perhaps to ask why you need a centralised web
site for this rather than tying it together distributed sites and people
together through links in the same way that rss permits news to be
aggregated without there being some central repository of the world's
The information about Facebook and the CIA comes from The Guardian.
See http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jan/14/facebook.
Since it was proposed to write software specifically to talk with
Facebook, I mentioned the issues this would raise. But Facebook is an
example of a more general poin
IMHO talking about Facebook and who should demand them to free info is a
bit out of place here. Please let's not diverge the thread into that or
into a battle about how much we should promote Free Software or non Free
alternatives.
In my fantasies, the free software movement might
Empathy is an instant messaging client, Facebook now allows access to
its chat network via XMPP. I meant that on filling your info Empathy
would configure an account for you so you can chat with your friends in
Facebook using a free software client, Empathy, instead of the web based
So say we all! Unfortunately, I don't see any free (or even close)
alternatives out there. The closest I can find are some local social
networking websites[1] but they've traditionally concentrated on
localization rather than internationalization.
Social networking sites are not
I read the OSFA guidelines, http://opensourceforamerica.org/guidelines.
The points it makes are good points; however, as one would expect
from an organization that is aligned with open source, it omits
the stronger points that should have been central. For instance,
that the use of a non-free prog
At a technical level, I wish that GNOME made it easier to relate
the visible GUI level to the underlying level of the command line.
When I designed GDB, previous debuggers for C programs had C-level
commands (viewing source code, specifying line numbers, examining data
using symbol names and displ
If people are going to use Facebook, they should access it with free software.
And it is useful for GNOME to do a good job of that.
At the same time, using Facebook is a harmful practice. It gives a
misleading impression of privacy, it has close ties with the CIA and
probably lets the CIA look at
> A. Try to make GNOME better in practical ways too.
>
> B. Teach him to appreciate freedom, so he will recognize that the
> proprietary programs are inherently inferior ethically.
however, point B is pretty much like saying that instead of coming up
with Copyleft you shoul
I value the potential market we can cater as highly important, as this
directly determines the size of the economical ecosystem we can build
around F/OSS. While most of us are not in this to become rich, we all
have to eat and feed the bills. If we want our project to have
signi
If the freedom offered needs to be taught and be appreciated, there is a
fundamentally flaw with that. True freedom should be obvious once it is
tasted.
If we had made that our criterion, it would have led us to reject many
past advances in our understanding of human rights. Society
How about a healthy dose of ambition and aim for becoming the best
platform of choice, regardless of the freeness?
If you mean that we would like GNOME to be better than the other
desktops in practical terms, of course we would like that.
That is an answer to the question, "Where would we
While freedom is an important factor in life, it is not the only
defining factor for quality of life. At the end of the day, most of us
want a certain level of comfort too.
We need a strong vision and strategy to become best of breed in
software. Merely being free will only ple
Freedom from slavery is a means to an
end, the "end" being a just society with no racial discrimination and
equal opportunity for all.
Freedom is not merely a means to achieve something else. It is
necessary in its own right. Mere equality of opport
but none has actually stepped up to write actual code (as Martyn says,
everytime you start writting something, you hit the legacy wall).
It sounds like this might be a case of conflicting goals that cannot
all be satisfied. If so, we might be able to enable progress to start
by making a d
Software freedom is a means to furthering our vision of providing
technology to all, regardless of means, physical and technical
capability or culture.
Freedom can lead to more available technology, but it is vital in its
own right. It is little benefit to have technology available
if
What's important
to GNOME is the vision and the philosophy of open access,
The philosophy of GNOME is that the user should have freedom.
If we talk in terms of "open" or "access" then we omit what is
most important.
Stormy asked people to suggest a vision for 5 years from now. I can't
co
Thanks for adopting the change I proposed.
Even if a program is proprietary, we invite its developers to use
GNOME as its interface platform.
I think it's a bit more negative
It has to be -- we must not be positive about proprietary software.
However, being more positive about
Your suggestions would probably be better received if they didn't sound so
much like orders.
I'm sorry if the tone rubbed you the wrong way, but I think it was
a misunderstanding. I was politely asking for someone to fix some bugs.
Vincent's proposal to explicitly list the acceptable lic
In response to the first draft, I pointed out that it rejected the
ideas of the free software movement, and the only form of support it
gave was use of the term "free software" itself. Your new draft
cancels out that little support, by pairing the term with "open source".
To fit GNOME's position
>> http://live.gnome.org/ProjectPrerequisites
>>
>> "The project must be free/open source software."
That text ought to say, simply, "The project must be free software".
Adding "open source" makes the meaning less clear. There are open
source licenses which are not free; "/open source" introdu
Anyway - as I say, for me they're essentially synonyms. For others,
including RMS, they're not.
See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html
for an explanation of the difference in philosophy between free
software and open source.
GNOME is a GNU package, and was fou
It is clear that GNOME needs to do more to educate its community,
including the Foundation members, about the importance of freedom;
that is, to communicate and support the ideas of the free software
movement.
The draft statement posted uses the term free software, but
it does not support
To deny a group or a person the legitimacy to keep intellectual property
proprietary goes against criteria five of the Open Source Definition:
A statement that uses the term "intellectual property" is tremendously
vague, since that refers to many laws at once, and treats them as one
single
5. No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups
I am being discriminated against because I can not make improvements
or discuss where the project is headed.
The definition of open source is a criterion for software licenses;
I don't think it applies to mailing list usage at all.
But I
Doesn't this undermines the values of the open source community?
To cite the "values of open source" as an ethical standard is ironic,
because the motive for open source was to avoid presenting an ethical
standard.
The founders of open source split off from the free software movement
in 1998
Non-free software can't even be "favorably mentioned"?
My second suggestion was to post an official GNOME response when it is
favorably mentioned. My previous suggestion was for a rule
about a much narrower case.
It seems you've grafted part of one onto part of the other, and now
you're crit
As it says in the footer of Planet GNOME:
...
*Planet GNOME automatically reposts blog entries from the GNOME community.
Entries on this page are owned by their authors. We do not edit, endorse or
vouch for the contents of individual posts."
This might be adequate for legal pu
Richard, as a GNOME member, suggested that we forbid any mention of
proprietary software on planet GNOME.
Nobody suggested that as far as I know. I certainly did not.
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As a specific example, to the question, "Do you agree that viewing
proprietary software as 'illegitimate', 'immoral', 'antisocial' and/or
'unethical' should be a pre-condition for syndication on Planet GNOME?", so
far 151 respondents have answered "No", only 19 have answered "Yes".
> You're also stretching the term "censorship" and related terms to an
> area where it does not pertain. For an organization to stand by its
> values, and not say things which conflict with those values, is not
> censorship.
Fine. We can simply call it "prior restraint" if you
I made an accusation against Apple which was false, so I owed an
apology. Being misunderstood, falsely accused, and vilified by some
does not in my view mean I owe an apology. Instead I took steps to
avoid similar misunderstandings.
Your words impute spurious negative emotions to the events:
We wanted Gnome to be a free software stack, and that was our
requirement. Gnome itself was assembled out of the available
components plus the requirements of the community that emerged early on.
GNOME was made out of available components and new components. In
particular, we discus
That's where the cash for things like my FSF-E
Fellowship, EFF membership, Creative Commons membership, etc., come from,
see?
These are worthy causes, but I would not encourage anyone to use
non-free software even to get money to give to a worthy cause.
However, the issue here isn't a
Bottom line: Planet GNOME does not exist for
the sake of "supporting" your, or the FSF's, agenda, and you're attempting
to solve a non-existent "problem".
We launched GNOME to serve the free software movement's aims. (We
launched the FSF and the GNU system for the same reason.) And
We _were_ attempting to finalize a Code of Conduct which could be provided
to speakers, in the hope of avoiding future instances of the sort of
"harmless fun" we experienced during Mr. Stallman's keynote at the Gran
Canaria Desktop Summit, as I recall.
What happened there is that s
I believe Stormy was quite clear and on point: It sounded to me as though
she were arguing against the sort of "prior restraint" that you seem to be
attempting to impose here.
I think GNOME activities should not grant legitimacy to non-free
software. This is a minimal form of support
Is GNOME part of any anti-proprietary software movement?
that terminology didn't come from me. I would rather describe what we
are doing in positive terms: GNOME is part of the free software
movement, which strives to give users freedom.
I don't think so and I've never seen it like that.
Gnome supports both the free software movement as well as proprietary
developers, and that is why Gnome for years has encouraged the use of
the LGPL license for all of its libraries.
The decision you and I made, in the early days, was to use the LGPL
for the more basic and general libr
Stormy, we seem to be miscommunicating. I said that people should not
promote non-free software on Planet GNOME. You seem to be arguing
against something different. For instance,
My post on hunting comes to mind. I self censor now because I didn't like
the negative comments directed at
> Richard said that Planet GNOME shouldn't be used to promote non-free
> software (i.e. software that denies freedom by witholding source code or
> witholding permission to use/modify/distribute).
But mono *is* Free Software according to the FSF definition!
Yes, it is. There's no
The people who work at VmWare also very often posted (and still post)
about their work and appear on Planet GNOME.
They should not do this, unless VmWare becomes free software. GNOME
should not provide proprietary software developers with a platform to
present non-free software as a good
Is it possible to provide filters so that people who are interested in
different types of blog entries can focus on what is interesting to
them?
This could be a useful feature for many reasons, but it doesn't
address the issue of articles that grant legitimacy to non-free
software. Th
> I don't believe Frederic was pointing at Miguel. There are people who
> have left the Gnome community working on products that don't use any
> Gnome technology posting blog post/ads for said product on PGO.
I wonder whether these products are free software.
If not, they certainly sh
Some of the people in the audience in my speech in the Gran Canaria
Desktop Summit thought that my joke about the Virgin of Emacs was
intended to make some kind of statement about women.
I was surprised by that reaction, since I had told the same joke dozens
of times and this is the first report o
Another problem with trying to find an issue here is that, depending on
the point of view, Amazon acted within their own Terms (point iii under
"Subscriptions").
Legally, that would make a difference; ethically, it is beside the
point. Some people are willing to sign away their freedo
Amazon was also the first significant provider of mainstream
commercial music to offer a 100% DRM-free music store, and also the
first (as far as I know) to offer a GNU/Linux client (albeit a
non-libre client) for their music store.
Distributing a non-libre program means mistreatin
And stupid patents
Many companies get absurd patents -- which does not excuse them -- so
in this regard there is no point singling out Amazon.
However, Amazon is one of the few that has actually sued using a
software patent.
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GNOME can't exist in a cultural vacuum. We should do
everything we can to work against DRM, to support sources of Free
culture, and to educate users about Free culture, DRM, and
non-patent-encumbered media formats.[1] But we also have to make
compromises sometimes, so that users
Created some Amazon affiliate accounts in US, UK, Canada and Germany so tha=
t
Jaap can set up stores and a Firefox widget that will enable people to
direct Amazon referral fees for their purchase to GNOME.
It is not a good thing for the GNOME Foundation to support Amazon in
this w
Here's a question that I would like the candidates to answer.
What do you think GNOME should do to support the
broader cause of free/libre software,
and the freedom of computer users?
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Here's a question that I would like to ask the candidates.
What do you think GNOME should do to support the
broader cause of free/libre software,
and the freedom of computer users?
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- US visa. It's a real issue. It's not a predictable and fast
process like most European countries are. It literally takes months to
get a US visa for those of us that need one. And many people going to
GUADEC need one.
I think it would be a good thing for GNOME to make a pro
GNOME is People. Do you have any evidence that the Moroccan *people*
are opposed to the values GNOME stands for?
I think the Moroccan *people* are not the issue.
"Those people have an oppressing
regime, ignore them" is not a really compelling idea to me.
If the purpose of hold
Is this the EULA that you're referring to?
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/legal/eula/firefox-en.html
Yes. It is quite clearly a non-free license.
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> This is why some GNU/Linux distros use IceWeasel, BurningDog or
> IceCat instead of Firefox. Since they build from sources
> and do not include Talkback, they cannot call it Firefox.
The reason why most people cannot distribute software compiled from the
Firefox source code
Firefox 3.0 will use Breakpad instead of that talkback software. At one
point the build included both for testing reasons. However, in the
current nightly it appears that talkback is not included (I know it
wasn't used for a while).
Is Breakpad free? If so, that is good news -- on
In working with the Mozilla Foundation, we need to keep in mind that
the Firefox binaries released by the Mozilla foundation are non-free.
Originally this was true for two different reasons:
1. These binaries included the Talkback module for which
source was not released at all. (Mozilla does not
So if
you want a research grant from the European Union, you're forced to be
using Windows...
We need to organize a campaign to change this. I wonder if Neelie Kroes
could help.
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http
Ok, you talked me into doing it. Check again:
http://www.gnome.org/press/releases/gop-a11y.html
Thank you.
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In our
company we have 75 linux desktop and 73 win32 desktops,
It would be better to say, 75 GNU/Linux desktops and 73 Windows desktops.
Calling the system "GNU/Linux" gives credit to the GNU Project
(including GNOME) where it is due. See
http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html.
Also,
Note that this press release is not about free software, but about
accessibility
It's about accessibility for GNOME, thus accessibility for free
software. The fact that GNOME is free software isn't the main point
of this announcement, but it should be a side point.
The only places in the announcement that "open source" appears is in the
Google's office name, and in the About blurbs of sponsors (Mozilla
Foundation and Canonical). None of which GNOME Foundation has any
control on.
That is true, but the GNOME Foundation has control over the who
This activity sounds very useful, but there's a problem in the
announcement: it doesn't mention "free software", but does mention
"open source".
Could you revise it so that "free software" gets equal weight (at
least)?
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For people who don't know what GHOP is:
http://code.google.com/opensource/ghop/2007-8/
It looks like a useful and worthwhile activity, but that page
describes GNOME as an "open source project". Would you please ask
them to describe GNOME as a "free software project", and to talk
about "
> In Chile, is there any chance you can help build up opposition
> to the government's pact with Microsoft?
This is really, really off topic.
It is completely on the topic. Fighting the pact is vital for the
whole free software community in Chile. Thus, every free software
activity
Diego Escalante requested sponsorship from GNOME Foundation to bring
latin american GNOME contributors to a summer FLOSS event in Peru. The
Board has aproved a $3000,00 sponsor for this event. Diego is also
discussing with GNOME Chile about a Latin American tour of some key
GNOM
I agree 100% here, just because we're supposed to have an ideology of
free software doesn't mean we should be against using non-free software.
The central point of the free software movement is that non-free
software tramples the users' freedom. We must not ever treat
non-free software as
I have not used Planet GNOME, and I have no opinions about how it is
run. However, a site without editorial control, on which people can
post whatever they like, should not be "the public face of GNOME". If
it is perceived that way, that is a problem.
To solve this problem does not necessarily m
Richard, I also like to see you show up in the GNOME Advisory Board
meetings and mailing list as FSF's representative.
Does that require travel, or can it be done by phone?
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GNOME is based on a philosophy, but it is not just a philosophy.
It is a project to develop and maintain a desktop environment.
A technical project has to make specific technical decisions. It
can't favor all the options that fit the philosophy; often it has to
choose an avenue and follow it. Wh
> I don't recall that any candidate explicily rejected supporting the free
> software movement by means other than improving the attractiveness and
> success of GNOME. But several candidates answered in a way that seemed to
> pointedly imply a rejection of any such form of support
There is no schedule for the next FDL. Since Wikipedia has made up
its mind, I want to (and owe it to them to) work on this soon.
However, there is time to listen to suggestions, if they come soon.
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If people are going to be looking at licenses, I would very
much like to discuss the FDL v2, and our usage of the FDL in
general. There are some troublesome parts whose implications
for GNOME aren't clear to me.
Would you like to pick someone to discuss this with the FSF?
Als
> Some candidates answered my question it by stating the intent to
> contribute to the community through the development of GNOME
> itself--and in no other way.
I didn't say "and in no other way".
When I say "If someone's drowning, and you know how to swim, and he's
not Bush, then
I think it would add value to spend more on marketing and on
evangelical community building opportunities. For example, Windows
and MacOS have flashy "Welcome to the desktop" presentations.
Perhaps it is time for the GNOME community to find ways to better
advertise itself.
It
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