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In practice, GNU is almost nothing. Years ago there was more cohesion, and there are some guidelines that GNU maintainers nominally follow, but in practice each
by jordigh 7y ago
In practice, GNU is almost nothing. Years ago there was more cohesion, and there are some guidelines that GNU maintainers nominally follow, but in practice each GNU package mostly does its own thing. A lot of decisions are made in a don't-tell-mom kind of way, i.e. we just try to make sure that rms doesn't notice when we do something he doesn't like, such as calling it win32/win64 instead of w32/w64 like he prefers.
One of the things I hope will happen with this statement is that we will regain cohesion and we will be able to stand together again like we once did. There's lots of good people in GNU, and I think we need someone like GNU. Principled, uncompromising, and now hopefully friendlier and more helpful than we have been.
- kellenmurphy 7y ago"Uncompromising" and "friendly" are not terms that one typically finds together.
- jordigh 7y agoWe can be friendly without having to compromise freedom. We don't have to be friendly to those who would want to use our software to take freedom away from others. We should be friendly to everyone who wants to use our software freely, regardless of their skill level. My view is that GNU should be working towards making sure we can get our software into as many people as possible by giving it an attractive interface, simple installation instructions, and a welcoming community, while at the same time refusing to collaborate with any who wish to proliferate non-free software.
- virgilp 7y agoRMS no longer fits your definition?
- DuskStar 7y ago> We don't have to be friendly to those who would want to use our software to take freedom away from others. We should be friendly to everyone who wants to use our software freely, regardless of their skill level. "We should be friendly, unless we don't like the people using our software"
- shadowgovt 7y ago> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance In the specific case of free software, the paradox of tolerance plays out concretely, in that failure to enforce copyleft on software can lead to the creation of software derived from that work that is itself copyrighted in such a way that the deriver could sue an original source creator deriving work from their derivations. I don't think anyone would consider copyleft enforcement "friendly," but the alternative is "free software has no ability to protect its core tenants," so some friendliness must be abridged.
- DuskStar 7y agoI agree that enforcing copyleft licenses is extremely necessary. My thought here was that "those who would want to use our software to take freedom away from others" is a bit too broad to apply to just that, especially when considering things like the recent Chef outage. In other words - some people are going to use GNU software to take freedom from others (imagine a prison running Linux, etc) in ways that conform with the license. I do not think GNU should oppose this.
- wott 7y agoAnd your first friendly act is to 'friendly' take control of the organisation someone else built to host you. That opens a whole perspective of refreshing friendlyism.
- shadowgovt 7y ago"Organizations" are a two-way street. A leader with no followers isn't "an organization;" it's just another solo project on Github.
- meijer 7y agoSo I guess this is just an opportunity for you to get rid of Stallman.