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Re: A GNU “social contract”?


From: Jean Louis
Subject: Re: A GNU “social contract”?
Date: Wed, 6 Nov 2019 00:51:24 +0100
User-agent: Mutt/1.10.1 (2018-07-13)

* Mark Wielaard <mark@klomp.org> [2019-11-05 23:57]:
> Hi John,
> 
> On Tue, Nov 05, 2019 at 01:39:46PM -0800, John Wiegley wrote:
> > He’s correct, I do not share the GNU philosophy, even if I enjoy
> > supporting the technical aspects of the software they produce.
> 
> Boo! If you are not with us, then you are against us! Sorry, I don't
> actually mean that. I actually think this is great. Because this makes
> you an interesting GNU maintainer. I didn't actually expect someone to
> say that. So now I would love to hear your opinion on the draft GNU
> social contract.
> 
> So, if you were asked to agree to uphold something like the draft
> social contract in your role as GNU maintainer would you then step
> down? Would your answer change if it said something explicit about
> whether or not you were to uphold it in your own time?

I hope that our GNU Emacs Maintainer is left undisturbed, please, as
my Emacs still has some serious bugs, and it would not be nice
hindering the progress of the development.

Despite the fact that John Wiegley signed the defamatory statement for
public shaming of Dr. Richard Stallman: 
https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2019/joint-statement-on-the-gnu-project/ I
would not like now that John Wiegley himself gets publicly shamed for
reasons of using whatever open source terminology or using his Apple
proprietary software.

It does not matter. That is his free speech. He does good works in
maintaining Emacs and for that he shall be respected.

Please see:
https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/maintain.html#Free-Software-and-Open-Source

16.1 Free Software and Open Source

The terms “free software” and “open source”, while describing almost
the same category of software, stand for views based on fundamentally
different values. The free software movement is idealistic, and raises
issues of freedom, ethics, principle and what makes for a good
society. The term open source, initiated in 1998, is associated with a
philosophy which studiously avoids such questions. For a detailed
explanation, see
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html.

The GNU Project is aligned with the free software movement. This
doesn’t mean that all GNU contributors and maintainers have to agree;
your views on these issues are up to you, and you’re entitled to
express them when speaking for yourself.

However, due to the much greater publicity that the term “open source”
receives, the GNU Project needs to overcome a widespread mistaken
impression that GNU is and always was an “open source” activity. For
this reason, please use the term “free software”, not “open source” or
“FOSS”, in GNU software releases, GNU documentation, and announcements
and articles that you publish in your role as the maintainer of a GNU
package. A reference to the URL given above, to explain the
difference, is a useful thing to include as well.

Jean

P.S. John, I do mean so. And I also think your signature there on the
public shaming page is not serving any useful purpose, could you
consider taking it down?



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