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

[three]

OH! i didnt know that Matthew can you post some links to give us that
dont know some more background on this 

Justin "threethirty" O'Brien
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> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: [SPAM] Re: [fsf-community-team] Gnome Dev suggests Split from
> GNU?
> From: Matthew Davidson <address@hidden>
> Date: Mon, December 14, 2009 12:01 am
> To: FSF Community Team <address@hidden>
> 
> 
> 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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