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-
