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Re: Hurd Mission Statement


From: olafBuddenhagen
Subject: Re: Hurd Mission Statement
Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2009 09:58:03 +0200
User-agent: Mutt/1.5.18 (2008-05-17)

Hi,

On Fri, Jun 05, 2009 at 09:39:51AM +0200, Arne Babenhauserheide wrote:
> On Thursday, 4. June 2009 13:45:55 Arne Babenhauserheide wrote:

> > And I just spotted something missing: The word "free" :)

Well, not exactly hard to spot, considering that I explicitely mentioned
leaving it out... ;-)

> Even though people who know GNU should know that GNU only uses free
> software, but this mission statement will (hopefully) also be read by
> people who don't (yet) know much about GNU philosophy.

Actually, I think that will rather be an exception -- at least for the
forseeable future...

> And adding these four letters suffices to tell them the essence
> without relying on previous knowledge:

I don't agree. People not familiar with GNU philosophy will either
misread it, or ignore it alltogether.

I think it's important to make the mission statement as concise as
possible. Adding anything more is always a tradeoff. Does it really make
the statement clearer and more appealing; or does it only make it harder
to grasp, and distracts from other important points?

I don't believe that the tradeoff for adding "free" is really positive.
The only purpose it could probably serve is pushing the GNU agenda in
general. Is our mission statement really the right place to do that?...

Having said that, I'm not really so confident about all this :-) What do
the others think?

BTW, if we really want to mention licensing, we should mention GPLv3
rather than just "free" I think. This way it would actually be a
distinguishing point.

It is also known to be controversial -- no doubt it would attract
certain kinds of people, and repell others... Do we want that?

(It's a bit questionable to mention it though, when none of the
currently active people really wants to work on enabling a switch to
GPLv3... OTOH, if people ask about it, we could say, "You care about
that? Help us making it true!" ;-) )

-antrik-




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