Re: A GNU “social contract”?

[Andreas Enge]

Hello,

On Tue, Nov 05, 2019 at 12:46:42PM -0500, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
> In the GNU project everyone is welcome, even people who do not share
> the goals and philosophy of the GNU project.

I do not think this makes sense, actually. As soon as we have a bit of
responsibility in GNU (like being a maintainer, which is the role I know),
we are also ambassadors of GNU. So I would expect us to uphold the GNU
standards. For instance, I would not find it acceptable that a GNU maintainer
goes to FOSDEM to give a talk about their newest open source software on a
Macbook, or using a Powerpoint presentation on their Windows machine. This
of course does not preclude that we may accept patches by such people; but
they are not "in" the project, but make contributions from the "outside".
It is completely reasonable to make this distinction, as Samuel explained
for Debian.

And in practice, I have yet to meet a GNU maintainer who would state
"I do not care about the four freedoms, I am just maintaining this random
package that happens to be under the GPL, because of its cool features."
Or is this your case?

Andreas