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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