Biased metric to produce desired result [LWN.net]

Biased metric to produce desired result

Posted Jun 1, 2011 11:20 UTC (Wed) by coriordan (guest, #7544)
Parent article: How much GNU is there in GNU/Linux?

"GNOME is proud to be a part of the GNU Project."
http://www.gnome.org/about/

It also seems that he didn't look at an operating system, but instead looked at a much bigger thing: everything packaged by Ubuntu. So GNU's contribution is watered down by counting 20 IRC clients and a load of software that most people will never install.

And that's ignoring the infrastructure work done by GNU - software, organisational, and legal. Who produced the licences? Who made the development tools so that other developers could write other parts of the system? Who set up a charity to pay people to work on the necessary system components? Who raised awareness of the importance of working on all this? Who worked on essays about policy and philosophy?

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Link to rejected proposal as "proof"

Posted Jun 1, 2011 11:26 UTC (Wed) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

Oh, and the link he provides for his claim that GNOME is outside of GNU, is to a post by someone who doesn't represent GNOME.

The person in question made the proposal because he was angry at RMS for saying that GNOME shouldn't promote non-free software.

The person's proposal was ignored.

Link to rejected proposal as "proof"

Posted Jun 2, 2011 17:30 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

However the thread itself ran about 95% disagreeing with RMS (you could feel the incredulity coming through the screen), 5% agreeing, and RMS's request was similarly ignored. That's... not the way he acts when making requests to projects in which the GNU Project holds the copyright.

Link to rejected proposal as "proof"

Posted Jun 2, 2011 22:28 UTC (Thu) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

> about 95% disagreeing with RMS

Maybe 95% of the volume, but that was mostly just two *very* loud people :-)

> RMS's request was similarly ignored

His request was that http://planet.gnome.org not be used to promote proprietary software. I didn't follow the whole issue but no announcements about proprietary software jumped out at me when I checked just now.

Link to rejected proposal as "proof"

Posted Jun 3, 2011 9:51 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

That's definitely true, as planet.gnome.org never contained announcements/promotions of proprietary software anyway. His request was that it never mention proprietary software at all. As this amounted to an attempt to control what hundreds (?) of people write on their blogs it met with the sort of success you might expect.