Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
Please do not post such long messages, my bandwidth is limited to 110 Baud.
Please do not send me a 2nd copy by private mail, I'm reading the list.
Also, could you use EBCDIC? It takes alot of processing power to convert your very long message from ASCII to EBDCDIC.
I don't use evil proprietary formats like EBCDIC.
But seriously...
Just imagine another organisation, say the EU, making an influential survey on an important political matter, requiring a certain OS, browser, document format or whatever that "98% of computer users use or have ready access to". What an outcry this would be here!
That is how it actually is and should be, the real problem is requiring people to install non-free software to be able to contribute to these things. With free software you can study how the process works, and even adapt it for your own needs, something that is simply impossible with non-free software.
(a) Stop preaching, please. We're on a FS list here. And note that in my paragraph you quoted, I'm not talking about free or non-free at all, but about the sillyness of quoting numbers as an argument to exclude a minority. (BTW, what you say is actually wrong -- you only mention freedom 1; software may give one of the four freedoms and still be non-free.)
(b) Even it if was a "free browser required" site, I'd strongly disagree, as I wrote. This would be a requirement unrelated to the actual freedom (just like in many cases where proprietary software is required, it's not because of the proprietaryness, but because of requiring some particular software that happens to be proprietary). IMHO, doing the same "in retaliation" would be worse than "open source" advocacy, i.e. preferring free software not because of its freedom, not even because of its technical merits, but simply by "decree". (Think about the message that would send: "Why should I use FS? Not because of its freedoms, but because you must use it in order to access this web site." We certainly don't want this.)
(c) The situation is not even like in (b), because not all free browsers are supported, only a particular one.
(d) And even this one, in some forms, is not really free as MJR has reminded us. (According to RMS in http://www.ofb.biz/modules.php?name=News&file=print&sid=353, "To use Firefox as free software, you have to build it yourself from the source code." I don't know myself if this is true, but if we trust RMS, it would actually mean this requirement might have made some people (who didn't build it from source themselves) use a not (entirely) free browser to view this site, instead of a fully free one they might have otherwise used.)
(e) The "Any Browser" campaign has never been an "Any Free Browser" campaign. If you (or the FSF) want to change this, you can start your own "Any Free Browser" campaign. But then please use appropriate icons or slogans to avoid confusion with the real "Any Browser" campaign, on sites such as gplv3.fsf.org that are not "Any Browser" capable.
Frank