How does each candidate propose to make use of GNOME and its communication to build support in the user community for free software and the freedom it provides?
The free software movement practices pragmatic idealism. Our ideal is freedom for those who use software. We say that all programs should be free, and our practical goal is to bring that about. The open source camp is pragmatic too, but mostly not idealistic. The promoters of open source generally don't aim to make all programs open source. They recommend a certain development methodology, presenting it as a practical issue and not as an ethical requisite. You could imagine someone saying "ethically, all code should be open source", but that's not the views of the open source camp. The idea of the GNU system follows from the free software movement's ideals. If you want to escape from nonfree software, pragmatically you need a free system to escape to. It has to be 100% free software in order to do the job; 99% free software doesn't get you all the way out. That's why we launched GNOME. In 1998, KDE was free software, but in order to use it, one had to use nonfree Qt as well. Thus, KDE was leading to a system that couldn't be 100% free software. We had to do something about that, and what we did is GNOME. (Nowadays Qt is free software, so KDE doesn't have this problem any more. Part of why Qt is free software is that GNOME put pressure on the developers to make it free.) GNOME's usefulness as a software package is independent of how we talk about it. However, the use of GNOME provides an opportunity to educate the users about this issue, in philosophical and political terms -- to teach them the idealism of the free software movement. Thus, my question: how does each candidate propose to make use of GNOME and its communication to build support in the user community for free software and the freedom it provides? -- Dr Richard Stallman President, Free Software Foundation 51 Franklin St Boston MA 02110 USA www.fsf.org www.gnu.org Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software. Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
