GNU censorship [LWN.net]

GNU censorship

Posted May 23, 2003 1:10 UTC (Fri) by leandro (guest, #1460)
In reply to: GNU censorship by giraffedata
Parent article: GNU and Ghostscript part ways

> a policy of concealing the existence of non-free software

Make it not advertising. Concealing would mean trying to hide, erase all visible traces from someone; not advertising means simply ignoring.

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GNU censorship

Posted May 23, 2003 19:43 UTC (Fri) by raph (guest, #326) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm not trying to stir up flames, but I think the word "censorship" is appropriate here. Basically, it seemed to us that to be a GNU project, we had to excise all mentions of AFPL Ghostscript, including those through one or two hope of indirection, including our main Web page and our bug tracker.

I completely understand and support the idea of not using GNU distributions to advocate non-free software. We were trying to respect that, but the FSF's interpretation of "not advocating" is too similar to "not mentioning in any way" for our comfort.

So we interpreted censorship as censorship and routed around it :)

GNU censorship

Posted Aug 7, 2003 20:49 UTC (Thu) by leandro (guest, #1460) [Link]

> the FSF's interpretation of "not advocating" is too similar to "not mentioning in any way" for our comfort

Granted, you'd feel like that because your codebase is proprietary. Still I can see RMS' point: giving leads to non-free gives the impression GNU condones it, and helps perpetuate the proprietary evil as he (and me) sees it.

Thanks for keeping the GNU GPL release, but I'd rather you had not parted ways. Now I hope ESP Ghostscript florishes...