Re: Code of Conduct and Foundation membership

[guido iodice <guido iodice gmail com>]

Hi to all. 

I'm not a GNOME Foundation member, then I apologize for this e-mail. But as enthusiastic GNOME user, I would like to send you my opinion.

First at all: thank you Richard Stallman and Miguel De Icaza for GNOME idea. Thank you Miguel for GNOME hacking and for Mono too. Thank you RMS for GCC, Emacs and other packages of GNU system.  Especially thanks to all GNOME hackers to improve GNOME every day.

If some of you use/develop/love some proprietary software, this not matter. Thank you for your free code in GNOME. 

As user, my vision is that free software is a competitor of non-free software. It is simple for me: free software was born to replace proprietary software.

Not only GNU/Linux is a competitor of Mac OS X and Windows, but all FLOSS are a competitor of its proprietary counterparts. I.e.: Firefox is a competitor of IE and Safari (and Chrome, that is partially non-free).
GCC is a competitor of proprietary compilers (and GCC won :-) ). 
GNOME was born as a competitor of KDE because it was based on a proprietary framework. Today GNOME and KDE are friends and both free/open source.

So the Free/Open Source Software is - taking it as a whole - a competitor of proprietary software.

You may be not in agree with me, but many users see the issue in these terms. They would like to have free/open tools to replace proprietary tools. They "feel" free/open source software as a proprietary software alternative/competitor/replacement.

I often read msdn blogs, google blogs, and other corporate and community blogs and planets. I never read on msdn something to "legitimate" Mac. Oh yes, you can read about MS Office for Mac, but it is different. You can read on GNU website about GNU software for Windows or Mac too. For GNU Project it is better to use Octave on Windows instead Matlab on Windows.

If floss is a non-floss competitor then it is logic do not advertise or speaking favorably about non-free software in the GNOME Planet.

Obviously, it is good to analyze proprietary software and learn from it. IMHO GNOME brings the better ideas from Windows an Mac, and it is better than Mac and Windows.

But GNOME, on top of a free/open OS, is a replacement of Windows and Mac. And I think that GNOME should "advertise" its "brothers" in virtualization software, like QEMU and Virtualbox[1], not vmWare. 

Then I think RMS suggestion is essentially logic and coherent with GNOME mission and with what users expect from it.

Thank you and best regards.

Guido

http://guiodic.wordpress.com


[1] it is distributed as free software too.