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Re: The General Public Licence (GPL) as the basic governance tool


From: Alexandre François Garreau
Subject: Re: The General Public Licence (GPL) as the basic governance tool
Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2020 02:40:06 +0100

Le lundi 24 février 2020, 11:12:09 CET Dmitry Gutov a écrit :
> On 23.02.2020 23:34, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> > I do see that some people do not judge the document for what it
> > actually says, and I think it’s a pity.
> > 
> > Over the last decade I have, again, not been silent about a desire to
> > work towards a collectively-run GNU.  But I’ve also done a lot for GNU
> > in that time, and I don’t think it’s useful to view every single
> > action
> > of mine as “part of that campaign”.
> 
> I think it's a real pity that the first public push for this initiative
> (which could be beneficial for GNU in the long run) started with you
> kicking down Richard who had just been unfairly treated by the public
> and the press in the preceding scandal.

Oh yes, so much…  I mean democracy is good.  I don’t think many of us 
sincerely believe autocracy or even monarchy is per se a good value.  It 
is simply something *hard* (or impossible) to achieve in more than just 
words (and this is something I would fear, and I’ll always prefer a loose 
monarchy to a self-declared-democratic oligarchy), and especially not well 
in all places (for instance it seems obvious to me than to GNU, software 
freedom should be more important than democracy… so if the former is to be 
questioned or made questionable by the later…)

If only that could be done with rms and not against him…

I think if there was *one* reason to believe a chance in governance would 
make rms contribute to GNU *more* instead of less (especially as now he’s 
not FSF president anymore, and his recent contributions weren’t so heavy 
or incontournable), there would be so much less opposition to any 
political change… maybe even none?

About software-freedom vs. democracy: note a *lot* of violent opponents 
(trolls, or not, depending of the viewpoint… and timepoint of discussion 
(some trolls were quiet or left recently, ruben was the last, kaz can be 
annoying but came recently)) were to underline the importance of 
*contributions* to free-software *philosophy*.  So they *are* sensible to 
the fact of upholding free-software value.

They simply happen not to believe a constitution, social contract, or 
simple written promise is enough for being trustworthy.  And for something 
as important as GNU, I agree (this is creative work, not some repetitive 
packaging task whose failing distro could be replaced by another and 
nothing would be lost).

Then they get vehement when they see a simple bare text being opposed to 
40 years of, let’s say it, mythical… literally legendary (in the 
etymological meaning) both technical and philosophical struggle of a man 
who may have been cultized (at least who became a cultural meme), but 
doesn’t look like the same authoritarian figure that could be criticized in 
other projects, communities or organizations (he simply doesn’t look to 
even have the time for that).

In these regards, though the amount of work and technical level is not the 
same, I’d give more trust (about political judgement, not reliability) to 
people like those of Libreboot, than of Guix.  And the same about other 
software projects which more relates to politics than technical skills.

My two cents.

http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

> And that is something you *will* have to work on fixing (because I'm
> sure others have similar sentiments).

:(




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