Re: Turning GNU into a bottom-up organization

[DJ Delorie]

>> Franta, I made suggestions, days ago, about a constitution for GNU. Let's
>> work on this suggestion.
>
> GNU is free operating system.

GNU is way more than this now.  Let's not limit ourselves.

> It has already its constitution in GNU manifesto and other articles of
> free software philosophy as written by Dr. Richard M. Stallman.

Can we distill this down to a minimum set?  Would the Four Freedoms
alone act as a "constitution", as everything else is based on those
anyway?

> Those are GNU systems that are using Linux kernel.

Give GNU more credit than that.  GNU is a tiny portion of those systems,
yet so many more people have chosen to follow the GNU way that we have a
very robust ecosystem of software to freely choose from.

> GNU project is ever developing project, but its goal to create fully
> free operating system has been fullfiled hundreds of times.

So what's next for the Four Freedoms?

> There is still much more to be done regarding users' freedom and human
> rights.

I do not agree that human rights - as its own topic - belongs here,
except insofar as they directly relate to exercising the Four Freedoms.
"Because software" can be an excuse to add anything to our goals, but we
must remain focused on our core - the Four Freedoms.

> Based on the above facts and history I really think that GNU need no
> constitution in itself.

I would say that the more people involved world-wide, the *more* likely
we need some concrete "this is what GNU is" that users can point to and
understand.  Otherwise the concept of "GNU" will be diluted and lost,
much like "hacker" now means something different than it originally did.

> and whoever is loyal to free software philosophy as envisioned
> by Dr. Richard Stallman,

A constitution would describe this philosophy, though.  How do we
otherwise follow what is only in one person's mind, if not by writing it
down to share?