Re: An April 1 joke? Re: [PATCH] gnu: Add systemd.

[Svante Signell]

On Mon, 2018-04-02 at 10:38 -0400, Leo Famulari wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 02, 2018 at 11:42:16AM +0200, Svante Signell wrote:
> > Hi,
> 
> Hi and welcome to the Guix community...

Thanks!

> > Seeing this on April 1st I really hope it is a joke. If not I'm not
> > ever going to support GNU software or anything GNU related any more.
> > You should be ashamed of yourselves.
> 
> Yes, it was a joke :)
> 
> Please note that within the Guix mailing lists and IRC chat we do our
> best to maintain a friendly and cooperative atmosphere.

I was hoping it would be an April 1st joke. And maybe I over-reacted. But fact
is that RMS has already abandoned the Free Software community e.g. by continuing
to support gnome as a GNU project.

So seeing this subject on the guix-devel mailing list, being a GNU project,
makes me very sad.

And the same happens again: He does not condemn systemd, calling it Free
Software due to the GPL license. In my opinion systemd is violating one of the 4
freeedoms of GPL: Freedom 1 (as well as the *NIX and KISS philosophy)
      * The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it
        does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the
        source code is a precondition for this.

It's really time for a re-definition of Free Software, not only basing such
definitions solely on the license at hand. It is also a matter of freedoms of
the users of software. Especially in view of that most Free Software nowadays is
developed by commercial players, having their own agenda, actively alienating
their users (and non-paid, spare time developers).