Richard M. Stallman, President-for-Life of the FSF, has been making a rare appearance on the GNOME Foundation mailing list in the past week. His main message is that Planet GNOME needs "rules" in order to provide "minimal support" to the cause of "free software".
Mr. Stallman initially stated, in the context of Planet contributors like Og Maciel, who works at rPath, that Planet GNOME "should not invite people to talk about their proprietary software projects just because they are also GNOME contributors". Stormy Peters, GNOME Foundation Executive Director, pointed out, "Planet GNOME is about people and we display everyone's full blog feed as it represents them. There are people that work on proprietary software as well as GNOME and that's who they are. I don't think we should reject people because they don't agree with us 100% of the time."
Peters' view is clearly in keeping with the disclaimer found on the Planet GNOME page itself.
Brian Cameron, of Sun, proposed that perhaps filters could be used, but Stallman responded, "it doesn't address the issue of articles that grant legitimacy to non-free software".
In response to Peters, Stallman wrote, "GNOME is part of the GNU Project, and it ought to support the free software movement. The most minimal support for the free software movement is to refrain from going directly against it; that is, to avoid presenting proprietary software as legitimate."
Philip van Hoof, author of TinyMail, also took issue with Stallman's statements, noting that "Forbidding...contributors to talk about their work goes directly and philosophically against the 'Planet GNOME is a window into the world, work and lives of GNOME hackers and contributors' slogan of the project."
van Hoof at this point suggested that perhaps the GNOME project should vote on whether it continued to be considered part of the GNU project, given the circumstances. Calling such a vote would require the endorsement of 10% of the Foundation's membership.
Neary, Peters, and others have attempted to dampen this move, on the grounds that it would be damaging to the community and the project. Stallman has continued to insist on the need for a response, now to any "favorable mention" of proprietary software on Planet GNOME, which would seem to exclude any postings which compared proprietary solutions to open source ones, which favorably mentioned cell phones or other consumer devices, as well as a variety of other topics.
Stallman has also admitted that he has no idea how often proprietary software is "favorably mentioned" on Planet GNOME.
This doesn't seem to be over yet. We've added a new poll—so please vote there, thanks!—and will probably be adding several more over the next few weeks, but it'd be interesting to see what people think in comments in the meantime.
- Do you think proprietary software is "illegitimate", "unethical", "immoral" and/or "antisocial"?
- Should Planet GNOME be conducted according to the FSF's views, or its own?
- Is Richard Stallman damaging the community with what amounts to a call for "prior restraint" on Plant GNOME?
These are serious questions. In my experience, the GNOME community has been both open and pragmatic, and that seems worrisome to Mr. Stallman.
