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Stallman Responds To GNOME Questionaire
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?"
Maybe I'm just on crack, but 2 weeks ago I ditched the Gnome desktop. I've always run Enlightenment as my window manager, and for a very long time now have run Gkrellm. So I looked at things and said, what am I running all this extra stuff for? Enlightenment has menus for apps, gkrellms holds any and all applet style things I need, and buttons for frequently used apps. Don't get me wrong, I love Gnome/GTK. All the apps I use use the Gnome and GTK libs, but there was no real reason to use the desktop environment. Plus my memory usage dropped about 20MB. Maybe this is off topic, but do we really need a desktop "environment"? I don't.
Bah!