questionary - who developes FS/OSS

[schilling at fokus.gmd.de]

>From Werner Koch wk at gnupg.org 
>12 Jul 2001 08:33:41 +0200 
>On Thu, 12 Jul 2001 00:06:06 +0200, Alessandro Rubini said:

>> Maybe I'm suspicious by nature, but why should we spend our time to
>> send personal information to those people? Who are they?  What is
>> their aim in this move?

>They are founded by the German Ministry of Economics (a different
>department than the one which gave the GnuPG grants) and are run by
>the GMD and Fraunhofer (those with the MP3 patents).

If you are interested in a fair discussion, it would help a lot to stay with
the truth and not to use unfair and clueless statements that may easily be 
prooved to be wrong:

-	The most important one: GMD != Fraunhofer - Full Stop!

-	the words above my statements associate that BerliOS is pro software patents
	which is definitely not true. I would like to give an example and add a pointer
	to a paper that I wrote for a debate on sw patents in the German parliament
	some weeks ago: http://www.fokus.gmd.de/research/cc/glone/employees/joerg.schilling/private/patente.ps
	... of course, this is in German ...

Just a note: GMD is a non-profit organisation (approved by the German tax office)

>Nobody in the (German) community trusts BERLIOS, probably due to a gut
>feelings.

After knowing the background for the first paragraph, it is hard to
believe that this sentence is more than your personal statement.

BerliOS currently has 132 registered pojects. If you take into account
that BerliOS is competing with the people from Sourceforge who (in 
contrary to BerliOS) have a commercial background, you see that BerliOS
is accepted by a reasonable number of developers. Of course, we need to
make BerliOS more popular in the future.


>One of the responsible persons there is attacking the GNU project
>everytime you mention the words GNU, EMACS or RMS, with total clueless
>and unfair accusations.

It is hard to respond to such fuzzy and indefinite statements, but I may
give you my toughts:

A possible reason why somebody may believe that the GNU project is attacked
with clueless accusations may be the fact that the person who believes in
observing accusations is missing the needed background knowledge in 
Open Standards and historical facts on free software. Missinterpreting
free speech of other persons because of missing background knowledge is a
frequent reason for developing prejudices.

Jörg

 EMail:joerg at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
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