3rd Fellowship Raffle to attract more Fellows

[Yavor Doganov]

Georg C. F. Greve wrote:
> 
> That is why no device is being recommended.

Quite on the contrary -- I initially thought that the list of devices
are such that 100% respect our freedom and FSFE organized this
campaign precisely because of that.

> As was pointed out by others before, this part of the raffle is
> about giving developers access to hardware that is coming closest to
> our goals and thus give them the best start in making them entirely
> free.

Our goals have always been 100% freedom.  Not 99%, not 99.9%.  100%.
I feel extremely uneasy to remind this to you.  There are other ways
of giving access to developers that want and can write free
replacements without promoting these devices.

> Without Debian there would have been no Ubuntu, and without Ubuntu
> there would be no Gnewsense. And Gnewsense itself helped influence
> others to think about providing pure Free Software distributions.

Listen to yourself!  gNewSense would never exist if Debian and Ubuntu
were 100% free GNU distributions.  To praise Debian/Ubuntu for
providing a solid code base to build (actually, to "strip" the
non-free bits) a truly free OS, that has always been the initial goal,
is disgusting.  The sole existense of distros like gNewSense, whose
task is not creative development, but cleaning the dirt created by the
others, is shameful for our community.  All GNU/Linux, GNU/Hurd and
GNU/kFreeBSD systems, all variants regardless who is developing them
should be free: this is our goal, namely, to escape non-free software.

> Without access to Ubuntu, Gnewsense would not exist.

I find your lack of faith disturbing.  It is more or less true that
freedom is, and always was, of low priority, but you are
underestimating the fact that a (small) minority of users will always
be motivated enough to provide a free distro.

> In the case of Ubuntu, the distribution was available without cost on
> the internet. 

So what?  I would prefer: against a fee, but 100% free.

> But if someone had told me that they wanted to create Gnewsense and
> they needed access to Ubuntu to do that job, I would indeed have
> sent them a DVD.

You are free to decide whatever you want as a person.  Bear in mind,
however, that you are an official speaker of the GNU Project and you
are leading this Foundation.  With this action, FSFE is effectively
inviting users to stop pursuing the goal of freedom.  You are
abandoning our ideals for the sake of popularity and raising funds.

This is more than sad for me personally, as years of respect and faith
I had in you have been swept away.