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Stallman Responds To GNOME Questionaire

Posted by timothy on from the hello-champion-city dept.

proclus writes: "Stallman's response to the GNOME board election process is a lesson in the application of free software principles. For Stallman, GNOME is a GNU project, and the main goal is to promote free software. His consistancy and ethics are admirable, but one wonders if GNOME has grown beyond its roots in the free software community. Is Stallman's view of GNOME too narrow? The GNU-Darwin Distribution and The Fink projects are a case in point. It is simply amazing how many people want to use GNOME together with Mac OSX, and yet in Stallman's view, this would be an example of GNOME falling short of its goals. If free software is used together with proprietary, then the movement has failed to displace proprietary software, and free the users. Is it possible to reach such users with free software ideals, and is it necessary to divorce free software from proprietary in order to accomplish that goal?"

4 of 542 comments (clear)

  1. Bah by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Funny

    You're all a bunch of Linus-worshipping assholes.

  2. At the funeral . . . by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    At a funeral service, the clergyman invited mourners to share their memories of the departed. After several people had spoken, the room was quiet; and the minister asked softly, "Anyone else?"

    And Stallman said, "If no one else has anything to say, I'd like to say a few words about Free Software."

  3. King Richard by Dix · · Score: 2, Funny

    He's a bit like the British royal family.
    They get endless flak in the press, but their reaction is a consistent non-inflamatory one-liner and a speech once or twice per year.
    Also, they have about as much power ...

    Nevertheless, somehow, they wield great influence.
    (Resting on past greatness perhaps?)

  4. bootstrap first, only then run. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    It strikes me that more than ten years after, when there is no proper mach based distro, RMS whould still have the guts (in the french interview) to spit on Linus.
    If there had been no dirty-hacked boo-ugly monolithic kernel to come to the rescue, contribution to FSF would come from only a handful of aristocrats running GNU stuff on 100kbuck machines running under 10kbuck unices.
    I agree with the ideal, but when there is no choice that matches the ideal, I ll pick the next best thing rather than condemning the whole lot.
    As if my machine would refuse to bootstrap because it s such a mundane job and doesn t match it s ideals regarding efficiency in LU-decomposition.