Noah Slater nslater@bytesexual.org wrote:
On Mon, Oct 06, 2008 at 04:35:37PM +0100, MJ Ray wrote: [...]
Is digg free software?
[...]
Uses facebook. I don't like the general thrust of that project either.
So, by talking about, linking to or externally active with a third party website you consider this to be a violation of *your* principals?
I don't understand this question. I was asked what proprietary webapps those FSF projects were using and tried to offer a summary.
Can we not say "free network software is great, let's do more of that" instead of trying to imply that it is even possible to use the Web as it stands without using some "non-free" network service.
Tell me, which search engine do you use and is it free software?
ODP aka dmoz.org and not entirely, but it was the best I found. I also sell some of my searches to a proprietary engine in exchange for meal vouchers, cinema tickets and so on, but I don't promote it. I don't value my search data much - my bookmarks are my first stop.
Noah Slater nslater@bytesexual.org wrote:
These are used by the individual software developers working for GNU and are not hosted or part of the official GNU website.
Nice dodge! So we could have links from GNU.org to the local user group sites used by the individual software developers working to promote and support GNU software... (but we don't and may not, unless they use blessed names or have a strong internal advocate...)
Not really.
The GNU Project is a volunteer effort, are you asking that it enforces the conduct and activities of all it's maintainers external to the official infrastructure?
Where those are linked from www.gnu.org as official parts of the development effort, that would be similar to how it seeks to enforce the naming, conduct and activities of all user groups linked.
Personally, I'd prefer it to standardise on liberalisation, linking freely and not advocating Affero. What I'm really pointing out here is that FSF's stance on third-party resources is unpredictable.
[...] advocates of AGPL to debian-legal recently included several users @gmail.com and when I criticise Affero on my blog, I can be pretty sure of responses from blogspot.com... maybe such users could do more to promote free software webapps by not using the non-free competitors?
Non-free competitors to MaBloss[1], your [...]
Ow, that page is dated and the software is obsolete - parts survive in the bizarrely-named schycyrssmerge2, which is a fairly efficient aggregation engine based on the set theory, but it's pretty niche. Thanks for the reminder to take it offline!
Non-free competitors to Wordpress (which I help some people host and develop) would be a better example.
Perhaps those users of Gmail don't have the means to run a private mailhost like you do?
Gotcha! phonecoop.coop and its Squirrelmail, Courier-IMAP and so on are run by a user cooperative. Although I do run similar services for work, I'm only a user of this one. Anyone can pay and join, just like I do - but how much is free software worth to you? (Other user cooperatives offer better value for most users, by the way.)
[...] I hardly see this are a major issue and it certainly makes me feel uncomfortable that you are imposing your value system on others in this way.
If we're not allowed to advocate our values, that would also stop Affero-advocacy, which would be fine by me.
What I'm saying is that people who don't currently support free software webapps should do so *before* seeking to use Affero clauses to impose their shaped-by-Big-Webapp-Companies values on me and other cooperators! I think many Affero advocates will continue using proprietary webapps, but good cooperative free software users will be saddled with the added costs of source advertising and downloading. Why should we pay for their errors?
Hope that explains,