Re: Questions

[Richard Stallman <rms gnu org>]

Bastien Nocera wrote:

    During Guadec2, you wanted ever single program reprinted to say
    "GNU/Linux",

That is not quite accurate--I didn't ask for them to be reprinted.
Instead I personally arranged to fix them.  I printed correcting
labels, and then I and a few willing helpers pasted them on by hand.
Most people seemed to enjoy the rite of getting their programs
corrected, and in general people had a good time with this.

The more important question is, why did the programs need correcting?
This is a sign of the general lack of communication between GNOME and
the GNU Project.  In the future we should be able to get it right the
first time.

    when the FSF didn't give one penny for the organisation of
    the conference.

Nobody had asked the FSF to help in any way with Guadec2.  The FSF's
financial situation is not as good as it was back then; donations went
down because of Sep 11 and the economic slowdown.  We have been
economizing everywhere.  Still, it is not out of the question that we
could help with future GNOME events, finances permitting.

    You also took the developers hostage to talk to us about
    things we already knew (software freedom... man, we were *already* free
    software developers),

What I actually did was give a speech, as I had been invited to do.
The doors were open, and nobody was forced to remain in the room ;-).
People did applaud, so I guess most of them did not feel like a
captive audience.  It was a short speech, so even if someone didn't
like it, he did not have to suffer for long.

I spoke about software freedom because I know that within GNOME
development there are people who want to reject this goal.  I wish we
could take for granted that anyone working on GNOME supports the cause
of software freedom and wants to cooperate with GNU, but this is not
the case in GNOME today.

I also encouraged more cooperation wiht KDE in the form of common
theme support.

    and to do feature requests (tell bugzilla not us)
    about a product you obviously didn't know.

I reported on what I had seen in using GNOME and said, at a very
general level, what directions I think needed emphasis.  As far as
GNOME feature issues are concerned, I am a user with years of general
experience in system design and some idea of what makes a system easy
or hard to use.


The cause for which GNOME was launched, the cause of software freedom,
is a controversial one.  Some would prefer to forget about it and
treat GNOME as merely a technical project.  The bad example of Linux
(and its use of Bitkeeper) shows where that kind of thinking can lead.
It is incumbent on peole who care about the goal of freedom to keep on
talking about freedom and how to protect it; we should make sure that
GNOME development does not forget that freedom is the goal.

I would like to ask the other candidates to say what they will do to
help GNOME promote the cause of software freedom, and how they will
help closer relations between GNOME and the whole GNU Project.