Re: Need of ‘stubborn governance’ (was: Turning GNU into a bottom-up organization)

[Dmitry Alexandrov]

ams@gnu.org (Alfred M. Szmidt) wrote:
>    > The only way tackle non-free software is to explicitly reject it, at all 
> times.
>
>    Then we can write that in a GNU social contract, instead of having to rely 
> on stubborn governance.
>
> Yet again, you argue that we should have a weaker governance -- that 
> "stubborn governance" is what is needed to keep things free.

Excuse me, do GNU actually have precedents when the ‘stubborn governance’ was 
proved to be needed to keep things free?

In any way, may I chime in with a suggestion to consider the concrete cases 
when ‘stubborn governance’ had been come into action.

For instance, one important issue of the last years, I can recall, was a Guix 
naming.

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’: 
they presented it as ‘GNU’ at GHM and FOSDEM, published the first alpha 
releases of ‘GNU’, and even the /gnu/ hierarchy is a remnant of that intention.

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 impostors”, so RMS, of course, strongly 
opposed that.

How such an issue would be supposed to be resolved with a ‘non-stubborn’ 
governance?

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