On Friday 15 June 2012 13:40:07 Henne Vogelsang wrote:
Hey,
On 15.06.2012 11:50, Jos Poortvliet wrote:
As I've said before, neither Github nor our Forums are open source. The registration for oSC will be done in Google this year - what's the problem? When users don't control the program, the program controls the users. The developer controls the program, and through it controls the users. This nonfree or “proprietary” program is therefore an instrument of unjust power[1].
And because we value free software an open development process, openness choice, standards, quality, transparency, our users and others and their work[2].
So, yes this does matter for our community and yes this is something to factor in (not lightly) for your decisions of which software you use for any purposes.
Please never forget, we are a free software project :-)
Sure, I factor in that we prefer open over closed. In this case, and used wisely, I don't see a huge issue. We're talking about a web interface over a bunch of tools we maintain ourselves - just some convenience and good looks. Nothing hugely crucial. And I would only want to use it for some of our stuff - say the livecd's we offer, not the main DVD or the rest of our software. I'm just saying - let's be practical, as we usually are, and make sure to offer our users the best our ecosystem has to offer. /Jos * Sure, I'd prefer using piratepad over Google Docs if it was stable enough. But it isn't and if it's a choice between using something very much inferior (say a wiki) or Google docs if I want to collaboratively write a doc, I'd go for Docs. As long as you're concious of the fact it's not open and make sure you don't depend on it for anything crucial, pick the rational solution. Re-building Studio ourselves seems like a silly waste of time - and I again won't suggest to rely on it as the only way we ship software. We do and always should generate our most important stuff with Kiwi and put it on mirrors for people around the world to distribute and download. But offering some of our stuff (say the KDE & GNOME liveCD's) for modification & download in Studio seems like a logical thing and the fact that Studio isn't open doesn't seem so crucial to me at that point.
Henne
[1] www.fsf.org [2] Guiding Principles