Sam Varghese
Saturday, 12 December 2009 02:26
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 4
The discussion turned to the fact that such censorship might offend members and cause them to leave the project. Dave Neary then
brought up the issue of members who had drifted away.
He cited the cases of Dave Camp, Seth Nickell, Alex Graveley, Telsa Gwynne, Jacob Berkmann, Ross Golder, Daniel Veillard, Joe Shaw, and Jorge Castro, claiming they all had left partly because of the project's "tone of discourse".
Neary also cited the cases of Nat Friedman, Miguel de Icaza, Glynn Foster, Waugh, Jody Goldberg, Bill Hanneman, Malcolm Tredinnick, Mark McLoughlin and George Lebl, all of whom he said were people still around free software, "but who no longer consider themselves GNOME community members - I can't speak to their motivations, of course".
The heat came into the discussion much later, when Mandriva's Frederic Crozat
pointed out that there were many people who had changed their focus from GNOME and were still on Planet GNOME. "Maybe PGO editors should start cleaning "the old cruft" (no offense intended)..," Crozat wrote. (PGO stands for Planet Gnome.org)
GNOME Board member Behdad Esfahbod then
commented : "But I find it interesting to know, say, what Miguel is up to these days. I don't think it's just me..."
This led to
a post from Pierre-Luc Beaudoin, which said, in part: "I don't believe Frederic (Crozat) was pointing at Miguel. There are people who have left the Gnome community working on products that don't use any Gnome technology posting blog post/ads for said product on PGO."
Stallman then
responded by asking whether the projects in which former members were involved produced free software or not. "I wonder whether these products are free software. If not, they certainly shouldn't promote them on Planet GNOME," he wrote.
The most recent reference to proprietary software on GNOME Planet is
a mention of VMware by developer Og Maciel.
De Icaza has posted about Microsoft technologies on many occasions, apart from the case cited earlier.
CONTINUED
