Did you know that the GNOME project was still officially part of the GNU Project (led by the founder of Free Software Richard Stallman)?
It is – but it might not be this time next year and I personally think that would be a good thing.
The GNU Project dates all the way back to 1983 and throughout its history has been an important place for all Free Software projects, like GNOME. Over the last few days, there was a bit of a flame-war going on various GNOME-related mailing lists about an article appearing on Planet GNOME – which is a GNOME news aggregator.
Stallman took issue with an article posted by GNOME co-founder Miguel de Icaza and argued that non-Free Software should not be promoted on the Planet GNOME site. (Stallman and De Icaza are not exactly on friendly terms, lately mostly related to Stallman’s opposition to the Mono Project, led by De Icaza).
It’s an argument that many in the broader GNOME community don’t agree with and could potentially lead to GNOME leaving the GNU Project.
“Planet GNOME is about people and we display everyone’s full blog feed as it
represents them,” GNOME Foundation Executive Director Stormy Peters wrote “There are people that work on proprietary software as well
as GNOME and that’s who they are. I don’t think we should reject people
because they don’t agree with us 100 percent of the time.”