[Savannah-dev] Re: Harsh message

[Mathieu Roy]

Savannah-dev added in Cc, this discussion is not personal and I do not
want to discuss that privately.

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> a tapoté :

> This message struck me and some other GNU supporters as rather harsh:
>
>     From: Mathieu Roy <address@hidden>
>     Subject: [Savannah-dev] Re: (no subject)
>     To: "Atsushi Ikuno\(ikuno.org\)" <address@hidden>
>     Cc: address@hidden
>     Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2003 12:26:40 +0100
>     User-Agent: Gnus/5.1002 (Gnus v5.10.2) Emacs/21.2 (gnu/linux)
>
>     "Atsushi Ikuno\(ikuno.org\)" <address@hidden> a tapoté :
>
>     > Hello
>     > My name is Atsushi Ikuno and sending this email from Japan.
>     > I work at IT industry in Japan. I was searching information for project 
> and
>     > found your site.
>     > Since I am not sure about Free Software, please help me for following
>     > question.
>     >
>     > 1) Can we include in your bin into our commercial product?
>
>     If by commercial, you mean proprietary, the answer is no (we would sue
>     you).
>     But it is possible to have a commercial activity over free software.
>
>     Please read the COPYING file shipped with our software to know your
>     rights.
>
> To say to somebody "we would sue you" is a harsh way to put it.

When someone is telling that he is thinking about turning a free
software into a proprietary one, I do not think it is a good time to
shy. 

> That is certainly not the way we want

We?

What do you mean by "we"?

> to respond to such questions.  Of course, we are going to tell him
> "no", but we will probably be better off if we do so in a quieter
> way.
>
> since you have a tendency to sound harsh, could you please forward
> licensing questions to the people whose job it is to answer them? 

No. I do not need you to grant me right of speech.

When someone asks savannah hackers for an _advice_  _from GNU_, 
sure, as any other savannah hackers, I usually ask him to send a mail
to address@hidden

When someone asks to a _development list_ to a project to which one I'm
contributor what he can do which this project, I feel totally entitled
to reply by myself. 


> Please acknowledge.

Please, drop this attitude. Being involved in free software is not
seeking for masters to obey, not for me at least.

If « some other GNU supporters » have something to say, they just have
to say it. 
Someone subscribed to the savannah-dev list have the fascinating
method, when he does not agree with a message, to write a mail to you
to ask you to ask the author of this first message to shut up? Well,
strange people, I would say that I'm not sure whether this kind of
persons belongs to the list savannah-dev. 
They are probably not contributor to the code (it is easy to make a
list of contributors for the last two years, take a look at the
ChangeLog), so what are they doing if they cannot even just simply
talk when they think they have a point to make?

Does it sound harsh? Well, what matters to me is not exactly how it
sounds but what it means.

(Please, avoid bothering me with this kind of issue, I'm not interested
in this kind of useless discussions.)



-- 
Mathieu Roy

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