[DotGNU]Re: DotGNU Manifesto - first draft

[Richard Stallman]

    The GNU project has taken a stand for the freedom of computer
    users, by making a complete operating system available where
    every component is Free Software, so that its users can freely
    modify and share it.

Rather, we developed a free operating in service of the stand.  A
stand is an abstraction.  You don't take a stand by doing an action,
you take a stand and therefore you do an action.

    To many people this goal has seemed impossibly ambitious, 

Delete "has".

    The GNU project has achieved its goal, but with this the work
    of GNU is not finished.

That appears self-contradictory.  You need to make the two points
more specific so it will be clear they do not contradict each
other.

       "It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights
       become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God
       hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; 

For the sake of the atheists among us, could we please leave
out the god talk?  Quoting Jefferson and mentioning Curran's name
would probably be more effective.

    The significance of copyleft is that it prevents a company from
    just taking the software, making some changes, and then selling
    it in a way that denies the users essential freedom rights.

The word "selling" will encourage readers to assume that the issue of
concern here is one of money.  If you say "distributing", that won't
happen.  See also http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html.

Now we get to more substantive issues:

    Any company which wants to make a major attack against Free
    Software will attack this defense first, and try to destroy
    it, or make it ineffective.

    Microsoft Corporation is now making such an attack.  

To some extent yes, but I think that is basically unrelated to .NET
and thus not directly related to DotGNU.

    For this reason, we need to be vigilant to prevent Microsoft
    from being successful with establishing the .NET platform as
    a de facto standard for internet-based applications.

It isn't clear to me that a replacement for .NET, such as DotGNU, will
solve that kind of problem.  Rather, there is the danger that the
patents will be used to prohibit DotGNU.

DotGNU serves a useful and important purpose: to the extent users
adopt .NET methodology and to the extent we can find our way through
the patents, we can give those users a free software platform.  But
that is a different story.