Re: State of the GNUnion 2020

[Alexandre François Garreau]

> Regarding punishing repeat offenders anyway, as we've seen just
> recently, you can't censor a determined individual on a public mailing
> list anyway. Limit their audience, sure, but banning them outright seems
> impossible. And I can hardly see the whole GNU project migrating off
> mailing lists.

If new younger people come in charge and want to succeed to “compete” with 
github, gitlab, etc. I can see how they’d like to replace mailing-lists 
with gitlab or other SaaSS-like web software…

It’s a general tendency that web tends to eat any internet-related 
computer usage… I dislike that… web is not appropriate…

> For better or worse, a lot of my colleagues, and a lot of users and
> Emacs contributors (the main GNU project I contribute to) use
> proprietary OSes. Even the maintainers do (though not exclusively). I am
> not fond of that, but I started using Emacs in a similar position years
> ago, and I wouldn't want to exclude any of them from being a part of
> our project because their stance is more lax, or that their end goals
> are more utilitarian (at least for the time being).

I know several people (I’m not anymore sure of it it includes even myself) 
who started using emacs on a proprietary OS, and then the beauty of Emacs 
brought them to 100% free-software life.  This is something of value 
indeed.

You might think support for proprietary OSes and “endorsement” of them (of 
proprietary software in general, non-endorsement of the strict GNU 
philosophy (which isn’t even actually so well described in the social 
contract as to imply that proprietary software, should, indeed, stop to 
exist, I believe)) are not anyhow related… but actually to support 
something, you need to test it, to use it, and to know how good it is in 
comparision with other similar uses on the same platform.  That’s why 
emacs OS X port is known to be pretty good.  There are people using it.

But then, either we make already-convinced full-librist use proprietary 
software, which is a pity, and not really natural… or we even stop then to 
go to 100% free software… which is even worse… either we *need* to accept 
people who don’t use 100% free software *because* they don’t want to, 
*because* they’re not convinced.  They’re likely a major amount of people 
who would be the last to be convinced.  By opposition with most of mankind 
who either never heard of free software, or doesn’t understand what it 
does imply (and what proprietary software imply (or simply what computer 
software is)).