GNOME Developer Suggests Split From GNU Project

blozza2070 writes "In a recent posting from Philip Van Hoof, he suggests that GNOME split off from the GNU Project and has proposed a vote. He was informed he will need 10% of members to agree for a vote to be put forth. At the same time, David Schlesinger (on the GNOME Advisory Board) has agreed on a vote. Stormy Peters said she doesn't agree with this, but then gave everyone instructions on how to proceed with a vote. She mentioned that roughly 20 members are needed to agree." The mailing list server is timing out as of this writing, but iTWire has the Cliff's notes.

Comments

Re:Because?

[memphis.barbecue]

According to the article, Richard Stallman wants GNOME to quit presenting proprietary software as legitimate. Assuming I read that right.

Why would he suggest that?

[buchner.johannes]

Philip Van Hoof
Fri, 11 Dec 2009 08:21:53 -0800

On Fri, 2009-12-11 at 10:12 -0500, Richard Stallman wrote:

> But GNOME is part of the GNU Project, and it ought to support the free
> software movement. The most minimal support for the free software movement
> is to refrain from going directly against it; that is, to avoid presenting
> proprietary software as legitimate.

I understand your position. I think you might not understand the
position of a lot of GNOME foundation members and contributors.

Their position isn't necessarily compatible with your position that
GNOME should "avoid presenting proprietary software as legitimate".

The way I see it is that most members want GNOME to stay out of that
philosophic discussion. Although GNOME usually advises to "work
upstream" and to "do things opensource when possible, as much as
possible". This is just a personal point of view, of course.

You, as one of the key FSF people, appear to be keen[1] on enforcing a
strict policy on how GNU's member-projects should behave. So ...

I propose to have a vote on GNOME's membership to the GNU project.

> I think Planet GNOME should have a rule to this effect.

I think it's clear that I disagree. Philosophically.

> There are many ways to implement such a rule, of which "block the
> whole blog" is about the toughest one we might consider. I'd suggest
> rather to try a mild approach; I'm sure that can do the job.

Let's first get a consensus from our members on GNOME's status as being
or not being a well-behaving GNU project, or having its own identity.

Original thread, alternative link: http://www.mail-archive.com/foundation-list@gnome.org/msg04068.html

The Short Story

[quantaman]

There is a blog aggregator called Planet GNOME which pulls together blog posts from various Gnome developers. One of these developers is Miguel de Icaza, a fairly senior GNOME developer (I believe he started both the GNOME and Mono projects, though I don't know his current position in them). Miguel is known, and somewhat infamous, for supporting MS Standards like C# (hence Mono, an opensource implementation of it), and OOXML.

In this instance Miguel wrote a blog post about Silverlight that reads like a press release. Silverlight is a proprietary and patent-encumbered replacement for Flash written by Microsoft.

Thus a promo for Silverlight was showing up on Planet GNOME.

This was not the only time something like this had happened, these are blogs afterall, people write about all sorts of stuff. Thus people started discussing a code of conduct about appropriate topics for blogs on Planet GNOME.

Stallman stopped by to offer his opinion (just couple very short posts in a long discussion) saying that people shouldn't use Planet GNOME to talk about proprietary projects like promos for Silverlight or even talk about using vmware since Gnome is a GNU project and opposed to proprietary software.

Philip Van Hoof responded saying he disagreed and started talking about a split, a few other people started talking about the rules surrounding the vote and the rest kept talking about the idea of a code of conduct.

I don't really know who anyone is other than Miguel and Stallman, but my gut says that no vote is going to occur.

Re:So they can't talk about proprietary products??

[gzipped_tar]

Have you ever met RMS face to face and listened to him explaining himself?

I have, and from my personal experience, he was nothing like an extremist. He has a rigid and well defined set of core principles WRT software (summarized in the "four freedoms") and he holds fast to them. But on other topics, he is very tolerant and shows great respect to others' views.

And he's very sensitive to the Dark Side, to what could possibly go wrong. This is the same sensitivity a careful programming expert possesses. A good programmer can sense the smell of bugs, terrible design, or poor implementation a mile away from the pile of computer code, and RMS can sense what could possibly breach his principles. A good programmer does not gain the ability of "smelling the bugs" by being an oversensitive, and neither did RMS. He is just careful -- He *thinks* carefully and so he anticipates the possible disaster.

I'm not trying to paint him as a flawless character, and if I sound like I was doing that, I apologize. I was simply telling my fellow /.ers my *personal* *impression* of him.