[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider ]]] [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies, ]]] [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
> It seems odd that our embrace of software freedom should keep us > from collaborating as fully as we'd like. It's not odd at all. As we see various activities pushed into unjust computing, which requires nonfree software and online dis-services, remaining free sometimes becomes difficult. You may have to refuse to do certsin things "everyone" does. If one of those things happens to be useful for working on GNU, that's not surprising as tyranny marches on. The GNU Project, as part of the free software movement, condemns those systems and calls them illegitimate. How does this relate to what GNU contributors say and do about those systems? Mostly it doesn't. What each contributor privately does with computers isn't the GNU Project's business. We have never tried to make any rules about what computing contributors can or can't use. But we do have rules about what computing they should promote publicly in connection with GNU. For instance, if you want to buy train tickets and maintain your freedom, you need to pay cash at a station. If you buy them by internet, running nonfree JavaScript and identifying yourself, that is a loss to your freedom, which we consider unfortunate. But it doesn't oppose the GNU Project's work, so we don't need rules about that. It's up to you. However, if the web pages for a GNU package were to suggest people buy train tickets via internet, that would creste a moral conflict: promoting, in a GNU web site, the very practices that the GNU Project aims to put an end to. This is what we have rules about. Not rules about whether you or anyone can run a nonfree program. But rules, yes, against publicly legitimizing, or steering people toward using, nonfree programs, in direct connection with the GNU Project. You can say whatever you like if you do it in another context with no visible relation to GNU. The point is that you shouldn't give the wrong idea of where the GNU Project stands on this issue. Meanwhile, we have a potential solution for donating money: GNU Taler. It shows promise, for the long term: even national banks are starting to get interested in it. (See taler.net.) But banking systems are not set up to interact with it today. -- Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org) Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org) Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org) Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)
