Re: [Hangout - NYLXS] State of the GNUnion 2020

[Samuel Thibault]

Ruben Safir, le jeu. 20 févr. 2020 16:30:40 -0500, a ecrit:
> On Thu, Feb 20, 2020 at 06:39:52PM +0100, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> > Alfred M. Szmidt, le jeu. 20 f??vr. 2020 12:32:16 -0500, a ecrit:
> > >    > > Our concern is that at some point GNU may be just completely 
> > > unknown
> > >    > > to free software enthousiasts. As in, when you'd ask people what 
> > > free
> > >    > > software is about, they would answer "ah, yes, the stuff on github,
> > >    > > right".
> > >    > 
> > >    > Okay, sure. But going back to Eli's point, the development activity 
> > > of
> > >    > individual projects is determined by individual project's members, 
> > > and is
> > >    > rarely affected by the actions of the leadership.
> > > 
> > >    The activity by itself, yes, but the choice of where to start a new
> > >    project, or starting contributing an existing project, leadership does
> > >    have a lot of importance.
> > > 
> > > How does that have to do with the overall project leadership, which
> > > hasn't changed significantly over the years, and yet had significant
> > > growth in new projects for several decades (if we take the graphs by
> > > Wingo at face value).
> > 
> > "Significant growth" is very little compared to the huge growth that can
> > be seen on other platforms.
> 
> Non-sense.  This is a platform to gaurantee the public has a Free System
> to choose from.  It is not to be measured feature by feature by grossly
> over built systems which spinning insecure parts in every direction.
> 
> The priority here not to build the best facebook ap.  It is to build a
> system that respects the user, user privacy and freedom.

I'm not saying otherwise.

But I'm saying that what newcomers mostly see nowadays is the github
trend. And thus will not even be aware of its problems and the GNU
project alternative. If GNU does not make actual efforts to be
attractive (without leaving out its goal, of course), its message will
not get received by new generations.

Possibly a useful statistics to have would be the evolution of the
average age of contributors.

Samuel