Re: [Off Topic] We need "Vendor"s? [was Words to Avoid "Vendor"]

[Dave Neary <dneary free fr>]

Hi,

Murray Cumming wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-12-01 at 21:06 -0500, Richard M. Stallman wrote:
> >    > We want to encourage non-free apps to use GNOME, but we don't want to
> >    > appear to grant those non-free apps ethical legitimacy.  We have to
> >    > choose our words with care to achieve both goals at once.
> >
> >    These are your priorities. Other people have other priorities, though they
> >    have the same aims. It's a difference of strategy, not of ideology.

Isn't our priority (globally) to create a free desktop environment?

Personally, I'm uncomfortable with putting the LGPLness of our platform 
forward as a major selling point of the platform - I prefer to put 
forward the freedom of what we do (community, access for all, and an 
open development platform and set of applications), and encourage 3rd 
party vendors building software for GNOME to move towards freeing their 
software (as happened with Real and HelixPlayer), rather than putting 
forward, as a major selling point, "you can build software for GNOME and 
keep it secret for no cost, and you can't do that on KDE".

That said, while I'm uncomfortable with it, it would be naive to think 
that it's not something people consider.

> Luckily, I don't believe any of the candidates share your ridiculous
> extremist self-belief.

I want GNOME to be a free software desktop. And while I welcome 3rd 
party developers building software on the platform, I don't think it's 
consistent with the goals of the project to encourage it, by putting 
this aspect of our platform forward as a major selling point. Does that 
make me a ridiculous extremist too?

Cheers,
Dave.

--
David Neary
bolsh gimp org