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Mozilla Foundation Meets The GNOME Foundation

Posted by Hemos on from the working-together-for-bettering-us-all dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The board of directors of the GNOME foundation recently met with a few representatives of the Mozilla foundation - discussing how they could collaborate a little closer in future. A number of interesting things were discussed, including XAML/Avalon and the future of Firefox in GNOME/Linux. Check out the minutes of the meeting on the Gnome mailing list."

1 of 380 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Preliminary list of agreements by Eneff · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    Not FSF per se, but GNU in particular.

    To start with something that sounds trivial yet annoying for many of us, GNU (Guh-new) is perhaps the worst acronym in the software world. It sounds harsh, and the thought of an infinite recursion point wrankles a lot of us.

    English speakers, as a generality, hate having a common term with more than three syllables. GNU/Linux brings it up to 4. There's a reason we don't always call it "Microsoft Windows."

    Many of us also get annoyed with this sense of self-importance. The build system is a big deal, but it only bought us a few years of time. Three years later and Linux would have been built using the BSD tools. (Or perhaps Torvalds would have helped fix up 386BSD... who knows?)

    Without Xfree86 (another horrible name that just gets shortened to X with good reason) and the GTK and QT toolkits above it have been more important to bringing people away from the windows world. Very few people were going to investigate this operating system that didn't even have a GUI. We can go through a list of items that are used every day in the Linux world, and noone things to prepend that to the word Linux.

    Most importantly, many of us subscribe to ESR's philosophy more than RMS's. This is not a battle for the soul of the next five hundred years of culture for many of us. We just want to get our work done. My life wouldn't be any more fulfilling if suddenly all software was libre. This whole inflated sense of purpose grates against many of us.

    We appreciate GCC, GLIBC, and the various GNU tools. The GPL was a nifty idea that spurred other libre and open licenses. I can even forgive EMACS. However, I'm not ready to swear fealty over this.

    And that's why many of us bash the FSF for its zealotry.