Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Seth Alan Woolley <seth AT positivism.org>]

On Thu, Nov 03, 2005 at 12:44:56PM -0500, Paul Mahon wrote:
> I can't see why we would care about being on that list one way the
> other. The truth is, is that there are packages out there for which
> there are no decent (GNU)free alternatives exist, Java is an example.

You can't be serious.  Java coding is a choice one can make if they want 
to write in a poorly-designed and monopoly-controlled language.

Just because we could build a java replacement doesn't mean we should.

> Just moving the grimoire to another host would still violate the
> "spirit" of the list, we would still be maintaining it, and thus
> advocate its use. 

Not if it's not officially supported by us and supported only be a 
separate (possibly overlapping) group of developers that want to waste 
their time helping The Man(SM).

> 
> It looks like a bunch of changes which will make things more difficult
> for new users, and we don't get anything for it except our name on some
> wall no one much looks at.

We get the ethical and philosophical benefits that aren't being counted 
because perhaps it's not very tangible.

Do we really want marketshare over a truly free and good product?  
Personally I don't think the cathedral and the bazaar is perfectly 
adequate at describing the process of free software developement.

It's, in fact, unfortunate that people like to follow ESR's lead.  Look 
at what he's written, I think his experiment was a bust.

Seth

> 
> I'm just not seeing the gain for us.
> 
> On Wed, 2005-02-11 at 22:02 -0800, Seth Alan Woolley wrote:
> > http://www.gnu.org/links/links.html#FreeGNULinuxDistributions
> > 
> > If you look at the above link, you can see some Totally Free(R)(TM) 
> > distros.
> > 
> > I wanted to ping the list to see if there's substantial support behind 
> > meeting their criteria.
> > 
> > We'd need to do four things:
> > 
> > Change the social contract to eliminate the "we support non-free 
> > software" section.
> > 
> > Eliminate the z-rejected grimoire to be hosted/maintained by a separate 
> > system (no SCM or website mingling, grimoire url to be explicitly added).
> > 
> > Scan the grimoire for stuff that needs moved to the z-rejected section 
> > and do that.  (The FSF keeps a list of GPL-compatible and 
> > non-GPL-compatible-but-free licenses.)
> > 
> > Switch our SCM to something(s) other than perforce for everything.
> > 
> > Who thinks this is worth it?  Who thinks it's not worth it?
> > 
> > Seth
> > 
> > P.S.  I favor becoming as Free(R)(TM) as possible.  I will do what the 
> > group desires, but I think it's something we should consider, at least.
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
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> > SM-Discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
> > http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/sm-discuss
> 
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-- 
Seth Alan Woolley [seth at positivism.org], SPAM/UCE is unauthorized
Quality Assurance Team Leader & Security Team: Source Mage GNU/linux
Linux so advanced, it may as well be magic http://www.sourcemage.org
Key id FDCEE733 = 5302 B414 64C4 6112 3454  E082 99F0 69DC FDCE E733

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