Re: [Savannah-hackers] savannah.gnu.org: submission of LumberMill

[Loic Dachary]

 > > I'm curious; my source code is Free. Why does it
 > > matter whether or not there is a Free method of
 > > executing it? How does it serve the objectives of
 > > the Free Software Foundation to restrict a new
 > > piece of Free source code from being published? Is
 > > it not possible to learn from source code without
 > > executing it?

        The distinction is basically the same as in Debian. You have
software that is in main (no dependency to non free software), in
contrib (dependcy to non free software) and non-free (non free
software ;-).

        On Savannah it was decided to provide resources to software
that fit in main, i.e. that we can use with the currently available
Free Software tools.

        We do not say that it is wrong that you write Free Software,
of course ;-) We just ask you to understand that we do not devote
resources to software that cannot be run on a Free Software operating
system, in this case GNU/Linux. Of course you could say that I can get
the necessary software gratis and that it runs on GNU/Linux. But the
important point for us is that if we do so the operating system as a
whole cease to be Free Software. Because of the restrictions of the
gratis software (that is proprietary) there is no way for us to create
a Free Software distribution including the necessary components to run
your software. There is no way we can modify the underlying gratis
software to adapt it so that your software better matches our needs. A
company would not be able to deploy your software on 100 machines if
needs be because of the usage restrictions of the gratis software. In
short, the proprietary software, gratis or not, is basically
jeopardizing the freedom of the whole system.

        This is a point that is rarely understood, unfortunately. And
proprietary software vendors are currently actively encouraging Free
Software authors to mix their software with proprietary software, to
depend on proprietary software. They very well know that introducing a
strong dependency to a proprietary software into a Free Software
allows them to effectively control it and limit it's distribution,
usage and evolution. The success of GNU/Linux should not hide the fact
that a Free Software operating system is not something that is granted
to us forever. It was the result of many years of work and deliberate
will of many developpers to build an operating system entirely made of
Free Software. We have to carefully make sure it does not become a
mixture of Free Software and non free software.

        As Jaime said, we should encourage the evolution and creation of
Free Software Java implementations. Is there any chance you can run your
software with the existing implementations ? If not could you help them
improve in some way ? 

        Thanks for your patience,

-- 
Loic   Dachary         http://www.dachary.org/  address@hidden
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