Re: Issues cooperation

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Fri, Nov 29, 2002 at 10:02:29AM -0500, Richard Stallman wrote:
>     3. ggobi: Listed under "Other" because its components have different
>     licences:  AT&T Open Source License, GPL, BSD, LGPL.  I don't know if
>     the AT&T one qualifies as free software.
> 
> I've checked, and it doesn't--that is what makes it a real issue.
You've raised GGobi before and received the same response.  The
portions of it that are AT&T clearly are not free software.
However, the project as a whole has a large chunk of GPLed code
(possibly the majority).  New development seems to have been fully
free for a long time.  Deciding to include them is a judgement call.
My judgement is that they are mostly free, and becoming more so
with time.  Why penalise the current developers ?  To claim that
their existence has somehow stunted or inhibited the development of
other fully free data visualisation tools seems like a stretch.
Have you subscribed to the ggobi development lists ? or contacted
their developers ?

> Using Docbook as a standard instead of Texinfo is one example of
> divergence on standards.
> --I found out only by accident.
The decision to use docbook was made in GNOME's distant past,
easily 3+ years ago.  It predates me so I can't comment on why.
However, given the vast amount of traffic over the years as every
project in GNOME has worked to develop their docs it is surprising
that you would only notice 'by accident' now.

> Just recently I heard that GNOME is telling people to use a program
> called popt instead of GNU getopt;
library not program
This was another of those decisions made in the distant past.  I
suspect Sopwith's popt fetish may have been the source of this
dependence, but I have no proof.
    /me shudders recalling ORBit's requirement of the magic libpopt
        version from the source tree for rpm.
Thankfully things stabilised.  However, as with the docs, this is a
decision that was well publicised to anyone paying even a minimal
amount of attention to GNOME development.

Richard, as with most free software projects the ability to steer
technical decisions is dependent on involvement.  Your contributions
in other areas buy you an enormous amount of leeway, but it is not
infinite.  The GNOME project would appreciate your input.  However,
to make technical suggestions you need to monitor the appropriate
lists and become familiar with context so that you can _suggest_
things when the decisions are being made.