Re: Grammar checking

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
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  > I'm attempting to refer to the project and/or development process
  > maintaining the primary distribution of the software.

I can see various meanings for that.
Do you mean that you want to talk about those things now
so you want to refer to them in your email?
Or do you mean that you want a free program's release materials
and documentation to refer to those things?

  > When a program
  > is distributed as free software, but the project that
  > develops/maintains/distributes that program exists in part or in whole
  > to promote either a proprietary or SaaSS version of the software, I do
  > not understand how the program and the project are effectively
  > distinguished for the purpose of Section 8 of the GNU coding
  > standards.

I think you have a valid point.  We could call it a "free program
with a moral shadow."

But we don't always have the luxury to reject them.
It could mean we can't compile the program we care about, not at all.
That would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

At most drastic, we could recommend that people avoid certain
languages whose tools have problems of this sort.

But just saying "compile Foo.blahlang" and including a make rule to do
it does not promote the Blah compiler very much.  So if the Blah
compiler has a moral shadow, it doesn't fall on the Foo program very
much.  Not if you don't talk much about the Blah language in the Foo
documentation (and why would/should you?).

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)