Welcome,
The creation of a Free Software Foundation Europe is an excellent
opportunity to clarify the distinctions between the FSF(E) and
GNU. This first requires that their foci be slightly shifted.
My interests are in the epistemic development of humanity through
the principal tenet of sharing informationally valuable software.
Software is any representation of information that loses no inherent
worth upon transmission between media (i.e., necessarily digital),
and currently includes software programs, software music, software
books, software art and perhaps eventually software brains and
who knows what else. This is a grand and vague concern, and one
I believe should also be that of the FSF(E).
Of those software types, GNU is concerned with improving the
epistemelogical value of software programs, specifically system
software, by ensuring the source code can form a mutable model in
the user's mind, enrich and be enriched by whatever else is in
there, and then be freely transmitted to other users.
However the need for Unix-type system software is transient. The
GPL is already faced with painful contortions. I would cheerfully
allow the death of GNU and the GPL if they began choking on,
respectively, irrelevance and complexity. They could then be
replaced by more appropriate, though equally transient, tools, and
joined by sister organisations devoted to improving the value of the
other software types. It's the many small tanks principle (with
apologies to Alessandro).
Jumping back to definitions of words -- the ebb and flow of a
language is notoriously unpredicatble: either 'software' will come to
be accepted using roughly the definition above due to its
increasingly similar mode of transport and need for interpretation or
else the term will die. My best recomendation resulting from this is
that, pending the whims of fate, you adopt RMS-style exactness
over the word, always qualifying it as one of the aformentioned
subtypes, or preferably the infinitely better terms you will duly
conceive.
In summary:
o The firm philosophical stance Georg wishes from FSFE
members ought to be concerned with high, broad and long aims for
humanity, and encompass more than software programs.
o Encourage the creation of GNU sisters, under that broad
philosophical umbrella of FSF(E), for music, books, video, and
whatever else is webbable.
o Keep implementation details like the GPL out of FSF(E).
o For reasons I hope I've made clear, don't have a gnu on the
FSFE logo.
(Abstraction, modularisation, encapsulation. Whaddya know,
those software engineering classes did come in handy :-)
David
