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Re: Need of ‘stubborn governance’


From: Dmitry Alexandrov
Subject: Re: Need of ‘stubborn governance’
Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2019 16:15:49 +0300
User-agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/27.0.50 (gnu/linux)

ams@gnu.org (Alfred M. Szmidt) wrote:
>    Excuse me, do GNU actually have precedents when the ‘stubborn 
> governance’ was proved to be needed to keep things free?
>
> Readline, Objective-C backend, not allowing propietery hackery with GCC, 
> GPLv3 and Tivioization, Emacs and plugins, come to mind.

Thank you.  However, Iʼd appreciate if your answer were more verbose.  I am not 
so good at history.

> Emacs and plugins

Refers to the question whether there should be a formal API to denote that the 
library is under GNU GPL-compatible terms, right?

> not allowing propietery hackery with GCC

Refers to the suggestion to make GCC licence more permissive to compete with 
LLVM better, right?

> Objective-C backend

Refers to events of 30 years ago, right?

Whatʼs about Readline and Tivoization, though?

>    IIRC, @ludo@gnu.org and Co. were initially going to reserve ‘Guix’ for 
> package manager only, while calling the system distribution ‘GNU’ — 
> simply ‘the GNU’

>    Being made that way, despite all the best intentions they had, it would be 
> obviously perceived as a statement “we are the proper and pureblood GNU, 
> while Debian and other GNU distributions are impostorsâ€, so RMS, of course, 
> strongly opposed that.
>
>    How such an issue would be supposed to be resolved with a 
> ‘non-stubborn’ governance?
>
> To understand a opposition, one needs to know the why.  Taking your statement 
> at face value as to what might have been said, that is, calling other free 
> systems for "lesser systems" would be unfriendly and unkind, so why do that?  
> That in it self would be a good reason to strongly object to such a statement 
> since it would alienate people working on other free systems.
>
> But now knowing the precise words used, making any fair analysis of the 
> decision is hard, and a simply way to find a false reasoning is to call it 
> "stubborn" or similar.

Sorry, I re-read this several times, yet still do not follow.  Could you recap 
it in a simpler language?


P. S. Are you aware, that your MUA munges multibyte mail?

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