According to a recent posting from Philip Van Hoof, he suggests that Gnome split off from the GNU Project and proposes a vote. He has been informed he will need 5% of members to agree for there to be a vote put forth (10% is the real number). At the same time NON-PERSON (on the Gnome Advisory Board) has agreed on a vote.
This suggestion comes because of Richard Stallman’s recommendation 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.
Stormy Peters claims she doesn’t agree with this but then gives everyone instructions on how to achieve this goal. She mentions that roughly 20 members are needed to agree.
Note: David Neary (who doesn’t agree) brought up the fact that he wanted to have a vote put forth in the past for a different issue and was required to have 10% of members to agree to start a vote. Stormy is only able to find numbers that point to 10% as well.
Gnome Foundation Charger (Mentions 10% Member Agreement for Vote on Referendum)
Update Today:
> An outcome whereby GNOME is no longer a GNU project could cause a lot of
> harm to the free software and open source movements in general – there
> would be massive negative publicity.I agree but we cannot be blind when the leader of the Free Software
Foundation is requesting that the “minimal” thing GNOME should do, is to
support it by, and I quote, “avoiding presenting proprietary software as
legitimate”.I fully understand that ignoring Richard’s request is the easy way. But
his request cannot be ignored any longer. He really wants this as a
“minimal” commitment from GNOME.No matter what feels good for us. We’ve been ignoring this for too long.
Such a commitment is, as far as I understand our community, not entirely
compatible with the current mindset of a lot of its members, so …I think we should be intellectually honest; by doing this vote.
Mr. Stallman was certainly right with his views on the matter. I am personally totally disagree with Philip Van Hoof ideas. GNOME go “free” ? IT is UNACCEPTABLE!
[...] Gnome to Split Off from GNU Project? [...]
[...] ADMIN’S NOTE: This article is in response to comments which attacked my article: Gnome to Split Off from GNU Project? [...]
Code is code, it can’t be copyrighted but what you are paying for is the service that has gone into the software, to make it reliable and feature rich.
Clara, dear, the GPL is enforced by the copyright on its codebase which actually remains with the author, under the terms.
[...] El post con la historia completa, aqui. [...]
“Gnome developers i suggest you to make gnome proprietary and closed source the gpl sucks!”
Nobody would touch it even with a stick if it will be proprietary. There’s much better Free and Open Source Software called KDE SC which kicks gnomes in mono