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Re: A GNU “social contract”?


From: Andreas Enge
Subject: Re: A GNU “social contract”?
Date: Wed, 6 Nov 2019 10:18:44 +0100
User-agent: Mutt/1.12.1 (2019-06-15)

On Wed, Nov 06, 2019 at 04:04:03AM +0100, Alexandre François Garreau wrote:
> No you misunderstood the role, which is technical.  So ambassading outside of 
> a project mailing-list is outside of this role.  Like any GNU member comments 
> on per blog.
> 
> Ambassadors of GNU are already listed in the GNU webpage listing whose who 
> are 
> validated as speakers to give talks about software freedom (and the specific 
> subject they might talk about).

Here we disagree. GNU is not developed in a cave without connection to the
outer world, with a few officially appointed ambassadors spreading the word.
We have a public role, and whenever we go to conferences or hacker meetings,
we get an opportunity to lead by example. If we want free software (and the
GNU project) to succeed, we must use free software and speak about it. And
I definitely do not need any official validation to do that.

> Many already do that, and I even (sadly, I was as shocked as other people, 
> but 
> that’s not a reason to shut up people) observed that on some past GHMs.  
> Along 
> with promoting software that only works on proprietary OSes.

To be fair, I have seen this only once. And as you say, we were all baffled,
so it clearly was not something that people considered normal.

> There are not GNU standards.  There is GNU philosophy.  And RMS moral 
> standards (by abide almost noone lives, or they’re very few and the 
> intersection with competent people is too tiny to be interesting).
> 
> We can’t except all people contributing by doing the hard, continuous, long 
> and stable work of maintaining and coordinating development of software to 
> uphold any standard

Why not? The way you phrase it, it sounds as if using GNU software and
promoting GNU standards is such a burden that it becomes infeasible on top
of the "hard etc. work of maintaing (...) software". Quite the contrary,
I would say. Your view above seems too narrow to me: If there is only one
person in the world upholding the standards, as you seem to imply, we cannot
expect a universal movement for free software to succeed. And there would
not even be a point, actually - it is completely irrelevant how one person
out of 9 billions lives. 

Andreas




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