Re: Privileges and practicalities [was: Re: [ELPA] New package: repology.el]

[Arthur Miller <arthur.miller@live.com>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>   > > What GNU project promotes is free software. GNU never says to its
>   > > users to use exclusively free software and never condemns people for
>   > > using proprietary software.
>
>   > Yet it maintains a blacklist of common GNU/Linux distros and labels them
>   > as "unethical", even if these distros (like Debian and Fedora) have a
>   > clear policy to exclude anything non-free from their main repositories.
>
> This is a miscommunication.  You and Jean are talking about different
> things.
It is a miscommunication, albeit on GNU project side. Not all humans have
possibility to use non-free software in all aspects of their life :-).

I think GNU project should tell people to use exclusively free software
*whenever they can*, and advice people to demand software companies to
produce free software.

As a side note, I think GNU project should make along better with non-free
world and work via other tools (actively via politics) to promote usage
and development of free software in society. 

> Jean is presenting the GNU Project's moral philosophy.  We say that
> every nonfree program is an injustice, so recommending a nonfree
> program for use is unethical.  To lead users to run it is unethical.
>
> When we say that a distro is unethical, that simply means that the
> distro contains or recommends or leads users to run nonfree software.
> Nothing other than that.
>
> It's not a personal criticism of the distro developers.  I'm confident
> that the Debian developers and the Gentoo developers are honest and
> follow their moral codes.  We don't mean to criticize them as people.
>
> We try to make this clear in gnu.org/distros.  If you see anything
> there which is not clear, please write me privately and show me the
> text you mean.
This is a bit paradoxical again. For the first, there is a slight
problem with saying that people's work is unethical, but not people
themselves. I understand what you mean, but I am afraid that a wider
audience is not that understanding. If we need to describe what we mean
with "ethical/unethical", than there is a bit of a problem
already. Maybe this wording of being ethical/non-ethical is not always
the best practial solution to achieve the goal of having free software
life. Maybe talking about offering better alternative in terms of
freedom and practical issues can be a better tool.

I am just thinking loud ...