3rd Fellowship Raffle to attract more Fellows

Georg C. F. Greve greve at fsfeurope.org
Wed Mar 14 12:30:00 UTC 2007


 || On Wed, 14 Mar 2007 11:56:25 +0100 (CET)
 || "Alfred M. Szmidt" <ams at gnu.org> wrote: 

 ams> And that is by distributing immoral and unethical software?

As someone else already pointed out, this is about giving people
hardware so they can free it. This is not very different in principle
From (for lack of alternative) getting a notebook that has Microsoft
Windows on it for the purpose of replacing Windows with a fully free
GNU/Linux.

Most of us have had to do this before, including the FSFs, because it
is almost impossible to get the hardware without preinstalled Windows.

That coupling is even more intense in the embedded area.

Is this good? No.

But should we let this stop us from bringing freedom to those devices?


 ams> You simply do not know if these people will write free
 ams> replacements or not.  You cannot know.

We feel that can put more trust in our Fellows because they have
already shown themselves quite determined to promote freedom.

But you are right. We cannot know.


 ams> Why not? It is exactly the same situation.

Because it would be a step away from freedom.

As explained before, the situations are vastly different.


 ams> That is exactly what people are being told right now with the
 ams> FSFE distributing this device to fellows.

It has been implied that we were telling this to people, although we
explicitly pointed out that we are not recommending these devices and
pass them on only for the purpose of finding people to free them.

But yes, as I wrote before, this could probably have been made
clearer, which is why we have reworked the page of the Raffle at

         http://www.fsfe.org/raffle

to explain this more clearly:

   Also FSFE will raffle these devices that need liberation: these
   devices are not shipped with Free Software only, and can therefore
   not be recommended for general use. Being offered these devices
   confronted us with a difficult decision. Because it is very
   important for our community to have entirely free devices of this
   sort in the future, we have decided to give them to people who wish
   to work to set them free. You can apply for them here but please do
   it only if you really plan to work on setting them free:

     1 Qtopia Greenphone by Trolltech

     3 Developer Discount codes for Nokia N800 Internet Tablets, by Nokia

The banners have also been updated to make this more clear.

Regards,
Georg

-- 
Georg C. F. Greve                                 <greve at fsfeurope.org>
Free Software Foundation Europe	                 (http://fsfeurope.org)
Join the Fellowship and protect your freedom!     (http://www.fsfe.org)
What everyone should know about DRM                   (http://DRM.info)
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