Re: A GNU “social contract”?

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

   > 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.

The role of a GNU maintainer has always been purley technical, and the
only responsibility that you need to exercise is to apply policies on
the project you maintain.  One neither speaks, or represents the
project just by being a GNU maintainer, those who do speak for the
project are for example listed on the speakers list
(https://www.gnu.org/people/speakers.en.html).  They are held to a
higher standard, see
https://www.gnu.org/people/speakers.html#becoming-speaker .

Maybe finding some some better representation of people who wish to
uphold the banner of the GNU project would be a nice idea, but I'm not
sure how that could be done.  Maybe https://www.gnu.org/people could
be such a start, to be listed you'd need to agree to some
fundamentals.  But that would be a different thing from what is
relevant for being a GNU maintainer.

   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.

That isn't a very uncommon thing, and there are plenty of such cases,
be it from not calling our system for GNU/Linux, to refering to the
GNU project as open source software, to directly going against the
Chief GNUisance.  But and even so, they are still welcome as
maintainers, since in the end it is a technical obligation not a
philosophical one.

   Or is this your case?

I personally support the goals of the GNU project, and its philosophy
-- but there are plenty of maintainers that do not, nor care for
either.  And they make the project a better place even though they
have a different view, since in the end ... they work on free
software.