Dear Linux Magazine Reader,
Within the big tent of the open source community are some corporations that are often considered "good guys" when it comes to sharing code and contributing to community projects. However, with few exceptions, the color of the hat is a bit blurrier when it comes to patents and the exigencies of a profit-making culture.
Big Linux contributors like Novell and IBM hold significant power in the open source community based on the teams of developers they place in the field, and many other companies also play a role in the great open source projects. The reality is, a lot of people writing free software work for companies, and their corporate role is often relevant to the code they work on, so they talk about their work on open source sites. All this has become so commonplace that it hardly attracts attention within the greater open source community, but within the unambiguous values of the GNU movement and the Free Software Foundation (FSF), such relationships are a cause for concern.
FSF founder Richard Stallman, for instance, has spoken on numerous occasions about the dangers of writing free applications based on the Microsoft's C# language, which is implemented in open source form through Novell's Mono project. According to Stallman, C# and all the rest of the .NET infrastructure is not so free as long as Microsoft holds control of the patents and maintains ownership of the underlying technologies. If you haven't noticed, though, Mono is playing an ever-larger role in the open source world, with dozens of Mono-based desktop applets ported (or written natively) for free systems. To further complicate the situation, software superstar Miguel de Icaza, who started the GNU desktop known as Gnome, is now the lead developer of the Mono project.
If you are starting to sense an impending collision, you are certainly not alone - except that the collision isn't as impending as it used to be. Last December, it all boiled over on the Planet Gnome site, where Gnome developers exchange information and talk about their work. Stallman weighed in to call for a moratorium on any post that could be construed as "...presenting proprietary software as legitimate."
Several Gnome developers chafed at what appeared to be the suggestion of restricting even the casual mention of proprietary software at Planet Gnome. A rousing discussion culminated in a call for a vote on whether Gnome should leave the fold of GNU projects.
By January, the matter still wasn't fully resolved, but there was some hope that cooler heads would prevail and this Gnome would not fly. It seems a shock to think of Gnome without GNU or GNU without Gnome. The free Gnome desktop has been a central feature of GNU for years now. I hope the parties will resolve their differences. I can't help thinking this might be yet another example of a white-knuckled argument that seems to be about philosophy but is really about definitions of words. Many users would agree with Stallman's concerns about "promoting" proprietary software - their real objection is about what it means to "promote." Is any miscellaneous mention equivalent to promotion? Perhaps an earnest and dispassionate discussion of this term "promote" would be easier than swimming in the maelstrom of competing visions of freedom.