Re: GNOME strongly supports open standards including OpenDocument Format

[Thomas Vander Stichele <thomas apestaart org>]

On Wed, 2005-12-14 at 17:14 +0100, Anne �tergaard wrote:
> Hi
> 
> During the election campagn many of the candidates expressed the
> importance of having free and open standards.
> 
> This is important for both proprietary software and FLOSS and for
> society.
> 
> Federico answered a question put to him about standards in this mail
> from Philip:
> 
> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2005-November/msg00177.html
> 
> I think that is was a very clever answer and would like the GNOME
> Foundation to draft a short statement of principle on GNOME's stand in
> this question.
> 
> The Gnome Board of Directors have if I remember right a meeting to night
> where I would like the board to give us its opinion.
> 
> If the board and the foundation members agree - and I hope we all do -
> then we could draft a short statement to show on our website at the same
> place where we have expressed that GNOME Foundation is against software
> patents.
> 
> We might even consider a press release explaining our point of view.
> 
> At the moment I am following closely what happens in Massachusetts
> OpenDocument adoption case.

I think this is a good idea; however, I'm not sure GNOME developers
agree with this as a group.

For example, people still feel that by default GNOME should ship with
stuff that makes it easy to encode to mp3 or rip CD's for their hardware
devices that do not support open formats; or that GNOME should play
DVD's.

Maybe a check with the developer base is needed first ? Putting up such
a statement as the Foundation and then having a lot of developers
disagree with it in practice seems a bad situation to be in.

Thomas

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