Clarifications: GNOME, GNU, Planet GNOME

In the item we ran yesterday about GNOME and the GNU Project, one aspect got snowed under a little bit. It turns out a claim made in the iTWire article about the role a blog post by Miguel De Icaza was false, and even though the claim wasn’t ours, I did repeat it, and therefore, should correct it too. I also need to offer apologies for not framing the opening of the article clear enough – had I framed it better, a lot of pointless discussion and name-calling could’ve been avoided.

The claim went something like this: iTWire author Sam Varghese claimed that this blog post by Miguel De Icaza, which talks about Silverlight, was what prompted the complaints about posts on Planet GNOME. Varghese had nothing to back this claim up, and neither did I – obviously. I did specifically made it clear that it was “just” a claim by iTWire, though.

In any case, the result was that a lot of the discussion around this topic focussed on Mono and Miguel De Icaza. GNOME board member Behdad Esfahbod has now made it quite clear on the Foundation mailing list that this claim is nonsense. “The ITWire article suggests that a blog post by Miguel was the trigger for Lucas starting the thread in f-l,” Esfahbod writes, “I can assure you (as a board member) that this is not the case. Yet half the comments are around that blog post by Miguel now.”

Another issue I’d like to touch upon is the whole GNOME-GNU divide – if such a thing even exists. My point with the article was not to summarise and talk about all aspects of the thread in question – I wanted to talk about how I feel about RMS and the FSF, because I know a lot of people feel likewise. Of course, a lot of people feel different, too, and that’s fine.

I did not make it clear enough in the introduction what my intentions were, and I want to apologise for that. I should’ve made it clear in the teaser that I wanted to talk about RMS and the FSF, and not about GNOME and the GNU Project. When writing articles, especially ones that cover almost a thousand emails, it’s easy to get lost and lose perspective on how to start and end articles. As a result, a lot of people probably thought that the GNOME-GNU issue was the main topic of the thread, and this is simply not the case.

I hope this clears up some of the confusion, and if the article did any damage anywhere (which I doubt, I have no illusions about OSNews’ limited sphere of influence), I want to apologise for that. Now, let’s all move on and discuss more important matters.

Climate change, anyone? Religion? Politics?

77 Comments

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