Re: [fsf-community-team] Gnome Dev suggests Split from GNU?

[Matthew Davidson]

Brandon Lozza wrote:
> What does everyone think of the controversial news of a gnome split 
> from GNU? It was on Slashdot

Slashdot notwithstanding, the GNOME/GNU split is still largely in the 
head of one person.

There's this one guy who wants to work on GNOME, but is not willing to 
work on the terms of the free software community. He's known perfectly 
well all along that GNOME was a GNU sub-project, but does not want the 
philosophy of the GNU project to play any part in GNOME.

He has tried, and will keep trying, clutching at any straws available 
(remember "RMS is sexist!"?) to try to wrest GNOME away from the 
philosophy that created it. This is really obnoxious behaviour, and not 
something you see happening from the free software community. We may for 
example prefer to see most non-copyleft free software relicensed under 
the GPL, but when working on non-copyleft projects with people who 
identify with "open source", free software developers do not demand 
relicensing, or threaten to fork an open source project unless the 
project wholeheartedly embraces the free software philosophy.

As RMS said in "The X Window System Trap" 
(http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/x.html):

"When you work on the core of [non-copyleft] X, on programs such as the 
X server, Xlib, and Xt, there is a practical reason not to use copyleft. 
The XFree86 group [at the time of writing, producers of the most popular 
implementation of X] does an important job for the community in 
maintaining these programs, and the benefit of copylefting our changes 
would be less than the harm done by a fork in development. So it is 
better to work with the XFree86 group and not copyleft our changes on 
these programs." (The same advice is given for the licensing terms of 
Perl, etc. - http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#PerlLicense)

When playing with somebody else's toys, you should play by their rules, 
or at least not complain about the fact that they _have_ rules. Most 
FSF/RMS bashing from "pragmatic" open source developers comes from the 
failure to accept this.

(Ironically, the same people are often perfectly happy to use 
proprietary software and abide by _those_ rules.)

If anything comes of this, I hope it will be the realisation that 
developers and projects need to be very explicit about whether they 
identify with open source or free software, so that in future trolls can 
be dismissed with "You knew what you were getting into, now play nice."

Matthew.

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