An interesting message was linked to me in e-mail just moments ago. RMS had asked Stormy Peters on the Gnome Foundation mailing list about proprietary software being promoted by individuals on Planet Gnome. I agree with RMS on this point that it is no place for discussion or advertising of properietary software. It’s no surprise that she wouldn’t want to ban proprietary software talk on Planet Gnome. It’s well known Gnome’s funding comes mostly from commercial interests such as ACCESS Co. Ltd who paid Gnome $10,000 in Q3
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2009-December/msg00040.html
Planet GNOME is about people and we display everyone’s full blog feed as it represents them. There are people that work on proprietary software as well as GNOME and that’s who they are. I don’t think we should reject people because they don’t agree with us 100% of the time.
My post on hunting comes to mind. I self censor now because I didn’t like the negative comments directed at my kids. But would you block my whole blog because a vocal portion of the community is anti-hunting and people in my family hunt?
RMS’s original question:
On Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 8:38 PM, Richard Stallman
wrote: The people who work at VmWare also very often posted (and still post)
about their work and appear on Planet GNOME.They should not do this, unless VmWare becomes free software. GNOME
should not provide proprietary software developers with a platform to
present non-free software as a good or legitimate thing.Perhaps the statement of Planet GNOME’s philosophy should be
interpreted differently. It should not invite people to talk about
their proprietary software projects just because they are also GNOME
contributors.
I don’t know about the feature set of the authors blogs but with WordPress I have seperate RSS feeds for categories. Why not have the Planet Gnome users provide an RSS feed that only talks about things that are “on topic” as opposed to randomness and proprietary software. If this is too much work I would recommend making policy to talk about Gnome and Free software only if you want to stay on Planet Gnome. Right now it’s covert advertising for various proprietary software and could also be subject to Astroturfing.
[...] This suggestion comes because of Richard’s suggestion that proprietary applications shouldn’t be given legitimacy by mentioning them on their blogs. These blog posts show up on Planet GNOME and it ends up looking like Gnome is promoting such software. I wrote about this the other day, Stormy Peters and Co Existing with Proprietary. [...]
Why not have the Planet Gnome users provide an RSS feed that only talks about things that are “on topic” as opposed to randomness and proprietary software.
Because that would directly go against the point of Planet GNOME – as Stormy Peters says, it is a feed about the people who work on GNOME, not about GNOME itself. As many GNOME devs do random things and work on or with proprietary software, “randomness and proprietary software” are on topic on Planet Gnome.