Studio Audience Says, "Planet GNOME is just fine." [LWN.net]

Studio Audience Says, "Planet GNOME is just fine."

Posted Dec 19, 2009 19:32 UTC (Sat) by Lefty (subscriber, #51528)
Parent article: GNOME ponders its code of conduct

Some data points on the governance of Planet GNOME.

I conducted a survey on the issue, which has received 1,449 responses so
farthe full results can be viewed at http://bit.ly/8ebcav and while folks
may not like the framing of some of the questions, I find the results quite
interesting.

Particularly worth noting are the 90 responses from Planet GNOME
contributors, with the following results:

To the question, "Richard Stallman has recently called for rules to be
applied to Planet GNOME to bar favorable mention of proprietary software.
Do you think this is reasonable?", 71, or 78.9%, answered "No". None
skipped this question.

To the question, "The current charter of Planet GNOME is to provide "a
window into the world, work and lives of GNOME hackers and
contributors". Should that charter be altered to ensure that the Planet
doesn't present views other than those held by the free software
movement?", again 71, 80.7% of those responding, said "No". 2 skipped
this question.

To the question, "Do you agree that viewing proprietary software as
'illegitimate', 'immoral', 'antisocial' and/or 'unethical' should be a pre-
condition for syndication on Planet GNOME?", 77, 86.5% of those
responding, said "No". A single respondent skipped this question.

There doesn't seem to be wide-spread support amongst the people
contributing to Planet GNOME for the kind of changes which Richard
Stallman has suggested. In addition, based on their messages to the
foundation-list, neither the Executive Director of the Foundation nor the
editors who have expressed a view support it.

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Some Survey Says "Advertising a proprietary software" should not be allowed

Posted Dec 20, 2009 8:00 UTC (Sun) by kragil (guest, #34373) [Link]

OK, let's spin a biased survey a little more:

What was the one thing with the highest support in said survey?

It was that

"Advertising a proprietary software product"

should not be done on PGO.

So how do you keep that from happening? Advertising is a vague subjective term and Silverlight, VMware and Access etc. are all proprietary.

Some Survey Says "Advertising a proprietary software" should not be allowed

Posted Dec 20, 2009 15:43 UTC (Sun) by Lefty (subscriber, #51528) [Link]

Yes, outright advertising is something no one wants to see. There's no
disagreement on that. "Advertising" is quite a clear term: it's the presentation
of a product as part of an attempt to sell it to someone.

When pressed on the point of whether there was "promotion" of proprietary
software, no one, including Mr. Stallman, could point to a single instance of
any such thing.

Mr. Stallman then altered his position to suggesting that simple "favorable
mention" of proprietary software should merit a response from the Board.
There's no demonstrable support for that idea.

Since the "problem" that the suggested rule was intended to solve doesn't
actually exist, what's the need for a rule in the first place? Why go out of your
way to keep something that isn't happening from happening?