questionary - who developes FS/OSS

[Bernhard Reiter]

On Thu, Jul 26, 2001 at 08:19:27PM +0100, E L Tonkin wrote:
> http://www.gmd.de/en/pressemitteilungen.html#Fusion
> http://www.gmd.de/en/aims_reasons.html

> sound to me as though nobody's really made up their minds
> on anything yet. 

The information on the webpages above are from Oktober 1999.
Thinks have changed since then. 
It was covered in serious German Newspapers.

> Mere quotation of marketspeak and newspaper drivel is
> unrevealing. However, Jörg has quite clearly defined the current
> situation, unless you have any tangible reason to disagree.

Werner's statement was correct at the time being.
Anyway it was a minor point.

> If there is widespread distrust of BerliOS, and this is a problem, how
> about getting an FAQ written of peoples' reasons for distrust and FUD,
> followed by the responses? 

This will probably be the next step as soon as somebody has time to do it.
Of course as usual within free software development
we noticed them directly first and confidentially pointed out the problems.

BerliOS did not respond and remedied them:

	* Where is the history and terminology section 
	in something called "open-source-mediator"? 
	The FSFE cannot acknowledge BerliOS
	if there is no proper attribution of the Free Software Movement
	going back to when the Freedoms were announced and the
	GNU-Projekt founded.

	* the GMD's general way of working is: get government money,
	create a product or special knowledge, make a spin-off
	to proprietorily cash on it.
	Where is the statement of the BerliOS people that they 
	know about this and plan to do differently?


> This is beginning to look like infighting within the German contingent! ;-)
Not really as BerliOS most visibly places itself in the open source bandwagon.

There are many other projects started in Germany or by Germans which
did have their quarrels with the FSF (and the Free Software Movement)
KDE comes to mind.

> Further, I might add (irritably) that "and my friends think so too" is
> never a good way to win an argument. 

Werner tried to point out an existing problem with BerliOS
(and got shot as the messenger.)
He informed his fellow Free Software Developers 
about the situation in Germany regarding BerliOS.

BerliOS still has to convince me, too.
	Bernhard
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