It’s been a little over a month since the initial kerfluffle about GNOME and GNU.
In that first run-up we basically had a couple of the usual chuckleheads waging war against a flimsly constructed straw man in hopes of discrediting RMS/FSF/Free Software with a secondary effect of promoting “Open Source” as the preferred term (and a tertiary effect of embarassing themselves). The usual tactics from the usual suspects.
Today, I saw that Bradley M. Kuhn is now a member of the GNOME Foundation. GNOME is in desperate need of people who understand and respect the Free Software ethos, so this is welcome news indeed.
Trollin’ Trollin’ Trollin’
That news also spurred me to peek in on the GNOME Foundation mailing list again, where I was disappointed (but not surprised) to see the same chuckleheads still engaged in the same tactics. At least in this current iteration the straw men and push polls are a bit more restrained.
Perhaps some of this restraint is because some of the mailing list members are taking the chuckleheads to task? It becomes difficult to maintain shenanigans when people point them out. The encouraging thing is that I think if you take the time to read the list, you’ll see that for a large part trolls are being recognized and called out for what they are. (Try this thread as a good example.) Welcome news, indeed.
Ignant
One special peanut in that turd of thread caught my attention:
Free software isn’t a synonym for open source, and by only using ‘free software’ you aren’t including all the OSI definitions which GNOME also endorses.
Ah yes, one of my favorites topics: “Open Source” was originally intended to be synonym for “Free Software”. Of course, we know how that turned out – and how right RMS was to reject the “Open Source” re-labeling.
“Open Source” is increasingly not being used in its original intent to avoid making “corporate types nervous”, but is being wielded as some sort of weird anti-”Free Software” weapon.
It’s especially rich in the context of GNOME, because GNOME was orginally purposed as being “based entirely on free software”, and was quite proud to be associated with GNU:
As most GNU software, GNOME application code will be released under the GNU GPL. GNOME specific libraries will be released under the terms of the GNU LGPL.
(You’ve come a long way, baby.)
Why are you even here?
I sometimes wonder why people who are not pro-Free Software, not pro-GNU, not pro-(L)GPL would try to be all involved in a GNU Free Software Project conceived under the auspicies of the (L)GPL?
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