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RMS Running For GNOME Board Of Directors
An anonymous reader points to this story at Newsforge which says that "RMS is throwing his hat in the ring as a candidate for the GNOME foundation board of directors. Speculation is that he's pissed because the GNOME summary keeps mentioning non-free software; now he's going to (try to) do something about it."
And they CAN choose to run what they want, no one is forcing anyone to run anything here.
What RMS is trying to do is block people from even being TOLD about software which is not part of his empire.
The software he is trying to block (StarOffice, and by association OpenOffice) is certainly what I think most level headed people would consider 'free', however he doesn't want people to know about it, possibly the knowledge would poison their brains, turning them into rabid M%@#&soft zombies or something.
Perhaps he needs to do a little more reading w.r.t. his 'free as in speach' concept, and stop trying to block people from finding out about what is VERY useful software.
I use OpenOffice, it works well, and it's free, I'm very happy about that, it saves me rebooting to read the one or two Msoft office documents I get per week.
It isn't enough for RMS to promote his ideas of what "free software" should be about. Now he has to censor everyone else and become the thought police?
...).
Who's censoring who here? Has he talked about censoring everyone? AFAIK this election is supposed to be democratic so you can vote against him if you like, but he's got the right to apply. Although I often disagree with him, I think it would probably good to have the two ends of the spectrum on the board: Stallman AND people from corporations (RedHat, Compaq, IBM?,
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
On GNOME's homepage they claim "GNOME is part of the GNU project, and is free software (some times referred to as open source software.)".
If they want to participate in the GNU project then they are giving away their choice to the Free Software Foundation.
As a user, you still have choice in what you do. But as developers they bought into something, and they need to follow through in their goals, or adjust their participation in the Free Software Foundation.
Joseph Elwell.
The reality of the situation is that there are some programs in this world that are not, by RMS's definition, "free," yet have value to many people. Examples of such programs are VMWare, commercial game ports, Word Perfect, and maybe StarOffice (forgot what the license is on that these days).
RMS represents pretty much the extreme of trying to prevent people from using what he considers "non-free" software. He routinely uses both license and PR to try to discourage "non-free" software. If he were in a position to do so, I'd expect him to work to work hard to prevent or at least strongly discourage "non-free" software from being able to use GNOME, for example by trying to force changes in the licensing. Look at the GNU libc LGPL isssue recently for a fine example of him trying to push the libc in that direction.
Why is this bad? Because there's some software that has value to many people that will be forced to use a different UI kit than the rest of your GNOME environment, and thus have a different look and feel and not play nicely with other apps. Who loses here? The user. And thus all of us who want to see *IX become a rational desktop choice over completely commercial systems. The long, LONG standing problem with *IX GUIs is that there is not enough consistency and interoperation between apps, and for GNOME to be successful in solving that problem it needs to not be discriminatory against programs that RMS doesn't want you to use.
On a more straightforward level, and again look at the recent GNU libc license issue, RMS is basically a nut-case and a control freak. If he has any real control over the GNOME board, it will NOT cause the GNOME board to make better or even more rational choices. I think it would be downright sad to watch a lot of good work from a lot of dedicated people become hijacked by a nut-case and made irrelevant.
Why is there a board anyway? Isn't the whole point to have an open system with a developer in charge, and not a part-timer (or commitee) who occasionally chirps in with orders for the developer. Think back to the darkest days of Emacs development, when RMS replaced the Emacs developer with someone that took many months before any development happened.
RMS has plenty to do without sitting on a gnome board. He may actually be good, as long as he doesn't reject features purely on the basis of their lack of relevance to hurd (eg. his rejection of X windows support in Emacs due to the fact hurd would not be capable of using X for some time).
Now that gnome has some real goals and has long discarded the "replacement of the evil KDE desktop" goal, it is probably a good time to let the developers continue with developement and not have things imposed on them by a bunch of uninvolved people that consider the project for a few hours each year.
Yeah, but users have tasted blood, and want a good/fast/complete UI to run on Linux, etc. All of these newbies grabbing Mandrake,for example, don't give a hoot about licenses. They just want something that works.
Unfortunately, GNOME is not up to that level where a newbie will feel comfortable with using it. I can only see its "marketshare" slipping even further behind KDE as the "market" grows.
I think that about the only thing GNOME can do now is become the ideal desktop for the experienced power user. In some ways it is already, but I'm an experienced power use and like KDE better anyway. So what are they going to do to attract users? I really have no idea.
RMS is not only responsible for the licsense that most GNOME software falls under, but also for a very large chunk of the compiler that builds it. I think I can appreciate where you're coming from, but to say that RMS hasn't made a significant contribution to GNOME seems absurd to me. I don't call it GNU/Linux either, but the man deserves a lot more recognition than he gets. Very few of us hard core Linux types would be where we are without the contributions of RMS. GNOME is symbolic of the fight against propriatary software, and RMS deserves a position on that board just as much as Miguel does, even if for different reasons. I do not believe that GNOME would exist without RMS.
While I usually disagree with you on many usability design issues, Mr Nickell, I totally agree with you on this issue. I seem to remember hearing some time ago about Richard Stallman not using GUI's, at all. Assuming this is true, would you really want such a person on board that is involved in some way in making GUI design decisions? Would a person who knows nothing about web servers, who has never set up a web server, who really doesn't know what HTML is or what it does really be a good choice as a board member of the Apache Foundation?
The root cause IS creating free software, that's what the Gnome Project is about. But software that interoperates and is build ontop of the architecture that the Gnome Project provides can be free/costly, open/closed. Imagine if libc was straight gpl'd. You could have no commercial application written for Linux. An LGPL'd Gnome library set allows commercial apps to be written for Gnome, and sit side by side with free (beer and/or speech) applications. And the commercial developers don't have to pay anything extra to make use of these technologies.
KDE, with QT, your apps are stuck being GPL'd, or you have to pay trolltech for QT. Yah, it's their project, they have the right too, blah blah blah.
For something that's as "essential" as desktop gui apps and related services, lgpl is the way to go. You make it cheap for *everybody* to develop apps, and it's a win win situation.
As far as RMS goes, he wrote emacs, created the FSF, the GPL, and the FSF has created so much great GNU software (especially for developers), it's not funny. I'd say he's provided a rather significant contribution to just about any project that uses GNU software, including the Gnome project. As such, by the rules, he should be able to run. Would he be a right fit? Will he be voted in? That's a whole other story.
And as to the speculation as to why he's running? I haven't seen any links to any vitriolic GNU/Gnome (lol, sorry, couldn't resist) oriented emails. RMS is not a man who's known for hiding his opinions.
Your killer app is just going to have to be open source isn't it?
Somehow I think all of the people that want to get rich on open source software without giving anything back (Trolltech has given a lot back) are missing the point entirely.
Miguel even stated he regretted having ever made GNOME part of the GNU project.
If he didn't make it part of the GNU project, there is a good chance that it would not be anywhere close to where it is today; licensing matters. GNU carries alot of weight and familarity with programmers.
Being impolite, rude and easily sidetracked don't make you liked by other people. If other people don't like you, then you have a hard time convincing them of your ideas, they'll be less likely to want to listen to you. RMS seems convinced that his personality should not have any bearing on his views, and he expects others to filter that out, when evaluating his ideas.
Well he's right, that's what *should* happen, but it's equally clear that it does not.
I think, just looking at the reactions of the slashdot crowd to his actions shows that he is not doing terribly well as an advocate. There seem to be quite a number of people who have nearly identical views to his, and still dislike him.
Imagine a manager who listens to a speech by RMS, hears about "freedom more important than features", "President Bush not really elected" and then gets rebuked for calling Linux "Linux".
Imagine the same manager asking his IT department to switch their webservers to Apache. Imagine it if you can, because honestly, I can't.