Re: Joint statement on the GNU Project

[František Kučera]

Dne 10. 10. 19 v 5:45 Jean Louis napsal(a):
> * Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> [2019-10-07 17:41]:
>> Hi František, and welcome,
>>
>> (I’m willing to answer questions like I wrote, but if we are to have a
>> more in-depth conversation, I think we should not abuse guix-devel for
>> that.)
> Now is too late, you are the one who abused Guix, and you should step
> down and resign from Guix. You are the one who is bringing hatred and
> separation in community.

I basically agree with you, but I do not like the „Call-out culture“ (or
„cancel culture“).

People do mistakes, it is natural, nobody is perfect and nobody is liked
by all other people. It is much better to fix the mistakes we do rather
than remove people. In this particular case, the fix is quite simple:
remove that proclamation from the official Guix blog.

You will never find a 100% agreement with another person in all
opinions. But it's important to have a consensus in the area you want to
work with. I probably[1] have different opinion on abortions than RMS
but it is totally irrelevant. I want to cooperate with him (and others)
in the field of free software – thus the opinions on free software is
what really matters – such opinions are relevant (not opinions about
sex, politics, religion etc.).

We should not escalate these conflicts because it causes damages to all
of us. We should calm down and think what our common goals are. For me,
it is the free software <https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html>
defined by the four essential freedoms. **And until we can share the
code under a free software license and make the world better through
creating such free software and providing it to the public, I will call
that cooperation successful.** Regardless we might have different
opinions on other topics.

As I stated in my blog post <https://blog.frantovo.cz/c/377/>:

People are different and have various opinions on various topics. But
the pure free software ideas are a common interest which leads people
from different groups and with different backgrounds to cooperation and
shows them the way how to talk each other and eventually build a
friendly and respectful community. It is much better than if people from
different groups stay in their own bunkers and just bark at each other.

Franta

[1] honestly, I have not studied his arguments in depth; I am not
interested in such discussion; and it would be probably also
local-specific (I do not live in the USA)