Il giorno ven, 16/08/2013 alle 10.17 -0400, Jasper St. Pierre ha scritto:
As I've said before, GNOME uses proprietary services for collaboration and outreach. We have active presences on the proprietary communication services Google+, Facebook, and Twitter. We displayed a large Twitter wall at GUADEC showing tweets tagged with the hashtag #guadec. GitHub is just another one of these services we use for community outreach, and I fail to see how it's any different than any of the others.
You are of course right. The matter should be probably discussed, as those services have the same problems of github, and free alternatives do exist.
There's possibly a discussion to have about whether GNOME should use proprietary services for outreach, but GitHub isn't really anything new here. In my opinion, if you feel strongly about the use of proprietary services for outreach, perhaps GNOME isn't the greatest fit for you.
Excuse me, but I happen to like GNOME, to like how it's designed, build,
and the developer community it has. I love GNOME devs, and I think they
are some of the best guys in FLOSS. I like the attention to details, the
project license, and the respect of the users freedom that comes with
it. Last time I checked, it is still part of the GNU Project! It was one
of the main reasons I got away from KDE years ago, in favor of GNOME.
Why shouldn't I try to change the (poor) direction things are taking to
preserve a piece of software, freedom and above all community I have an
emotional attachment to? Or is it already the situation so desperate
that GNOME is not "the greatest fit" for me, and I should look elsewhere
("don't bother, go away")?
In the end, I might just do so, if everyone turns out to be uninterested
in the fundamental values of free software. For once, I might start by
canceling my monthly donations. And with me, others — fewer than you
would gain by aggressive marketing, sure, but still. I always advocate
for GNOME. I'd hate starting to advocate against it.
You can indeed become fairly popular ignoring fundamental users'
freedoms (look at Ubuntu). But what are you willing to give up just to
be popular? Many a showgirl would give answers on that topic that would
make a seasoned sailor blush... I hope GNOME is not selling out.
In the end, you just find yourself more and more tied to those
proprietary services you tried to escape in the first place by creating
a system such as GNOME. If you have a Facebook account, for instance,
think how willing you are to close it down, even now after seeing the
Snowden datagate emerging.
Besides, while github is not free, gitorious and others are. Diaspora is
still experimental and not on-par with things such as Google+ or
Facebook, but gitorious is a good alternative. So even on a technical
level, this choice reeks. Also because by working with e.g. the
gitorious team, one could have also found more bugs / asked for some
features which would then be fixed in an open-source product, benefiting
the community at large. So there's an indirect contribution too to the
well-being of everyone.
I'm not implying a slippery-slope argument here: I don't think GNOME
will become closed source in the near future, or anything like that. But
there have been constant signs of going adrift in latest years, and not
always users have been heard out / notified. A community needs to be
built, or it will dissolve. While I appreciate the development effort
went into GNOME in the 3.x cycle, I also believe that it has not gotten
better at all in community-building, hemorrhaging users to other DEs.
And it won't be Facebook, Google+ or github to solve the fundamental
problem: poor communication and unilateral decisions (especially from
the designers, sorry guys) instead of building consensus or at least
discussing why their ideas are sounder than the others'.
Anyway, interoperability from GNOME's side with proprietary systems is
good. It allows users, if informed correctly, even to migrate and
transition to open systems. But relying on proprietary systems still
sends the wrong message, imho. It's like we cannot come up with
something working ourselves.
Else, give GMail accounts to all @gnome.org people, and just put an
alias into place. And move MLs to google groups. Maintaining a mail
server is quite frankly a pain in the ass, spam filters, CVEs and all,
so why losing sysadmining time onto it, when GMail works technically
better than anything else going around? (that was a rhetorical question,
of course).
Cheers,
--
Matteo Settenvini
FSF Associated Member
Email : matteo member fsf org
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