Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] Re: [Savannah-register-public] project approval

[Valentin Villenave]

[Sorry Alex, obviously this message was meant for LynX. Reposting:]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Valentin Villenave <address@hidden>
Date: Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 12:44 AM

On Sun, Feb 27, 2011 at 11:36 PM, Alex Fernandez <address@hidden> wrote:
>  If free software on those
> platforms is deliberately handicapped, it will probably not make
> people move over to free platforms; instead they will think that free
> software is worse than the proprietary alternatives. Also, even the
> best free software advocates do have to use proprietary platforms from
> time to time, and being able to use free software there as comfortably
> as possible will always be a good thing.

If I may just add my two cents here...

LynX: I'm just another Savannah subscriber/Free Software advocate, and
I certainly can relate to the "let's bring Free-Software to non-free
platforms" approach (whether or not it can be hosted on Savannah is a
different problem).

I do, however, take issue with having to use (and download, and
install) non-free development tools to build said Free-Software (the
Sumatra PDF reader is a good example of what should not be done in
this regard).

If anything, I'd strongly invite you to consider rewriting your
makefiles to make use of mingw or any other Windows-compatible Free
Software compiler; as long as it requires Microsoft's proprietary
tools (free of charge or not, that's not the point), that alone should
prevent the GNU project from hosting your extension, no matter the OS.

Sorry for chiming in, I hope you won't take this the wrong way :)

Cheers,
Valentin.