Strategy and serendipity

Carsten Agger agger at modspil.dk
Wed May 8 12:41:59 UTC 2019


On 5/8/19 12:55 PM, Bernhard E. Reiter wrote:

>> The question in relation to your post is: What are the precise goals
>> of the GNU "initiativ" (my terminology, explained in [1]) and how can they be 
>> measured and reached? What is having a "free operating system"?
>>
>> One that is is "available", or is "easily" availble, what does "easy" mean?
>>
As I wrote, GNU constitutes, as I see it, the components of a free
operating system which is upstream to a lot of other great projects
including, e.g., Debian.

So I suppose GNU is an "initiative", in your sense, in the same sense as
Debian is - and it's "finished" in the same sense.

But that means that it's *not* finished, since OSs need to be maintained
to stay alive.


As for the ultimate goals of something like the GNU project I can't
speak for them, but I'd say a reasonable goal would be that it should be
realistically feasible for *everybody* to choose to use only free
software, on all kinds of software-equipped devices that people normally
use.

Which would mean at least computers and mobile devices. If we look at
computers, we're not quite there - people can, most of the time, opt to
use free software in their private lives, but will often be forced to
use proprietary software at work.

As for mobile devices, we're not there *at all*. It's definitely not
realistically feasible for everybody to acquire devices with a free OS
and run only free apps. That's part of the point Paul raised: We don't
just need awareness about software freedom, we need actual software for
people to use.

Best
Carsten



-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.fsfe.org/pipermail/discussion/attachments/20190508/0fefa3cf/attachment.sig>


More information about the Discussion mailing list