Re: [DotGNU]Official statement of Philosophy (DotGNU Manifesto)

[Peter Minten]

S11001001 wrote:
>
> To resurrect the idea of a unique "DotGNU Manifesto". I have previously
> stated the reasons for this; the most important is that for most people,
> DotGNU has the opportunity to introduce the notion of Free Software
> philosophy first. That is, they haven't read anything in /philosophy. So
> we had a little discussion on developers
> 
<http://subscribe.dotgnu.org/pipermail/developers/2002-April/thread.html#6639> 
> about this, but died when people got stuck on religious discussion. So
> then came Peter Minten's PHILOSOPHY file, which became a chapter to put
> in all DotGNU manuals. But I still believe some kind of Manifesto, be it
> nb's or silvernerd's, should be officially endorsed, and the two should
> be merged. I have not addressed this issue yet.

I'd be willing to merge Philosophy with the Manifesto, there isn't much
difference in size and Manifesto is much better written.

Here are a few suggestions for the Manifesto:
* A account of how the idea of DotGNU was born, how the first projects 
emerged and also a bit on how fast new projects are emerging. 
* Statement of commitment of DotGNU to work together with other free 
software and open source projects.
* References to other good Free Software introduction texts (the GNU 
philosophy webpages, the GNU manifesto).
* Telling people that Free Software is the only way to garantee free speech 
over the internet. It would be simple for secret services to force propietary
software makers to build in spy codes in the software (and they probably 
will), it wouldn't be possible to spy that way with Free Software since every 
user will be able to pull out the spy codes. 
* We should state that we want to give users the power to be as anonymous as
possible on the net and to have secure internet connections.
* We should give an example of how work started by a few can cause a (near)
revolution. The best example of this would be the Linux kernel, using Linux as
an example will send a gesture of goodwill to the Open Source world (which is
needed to get the Open Source developers on our side). The Manifesto 
currently only talks about Free Software and Free Software developers, but we 
_need_ the support from the Open Source world.
* The Manifesto should IMHO start by reminding people what freedom means, 
it's too easy to read about freedom without understanding (and feeling) it 
and if you can't understand the true complete meaning of the word freedom you 
can't understand the true importance of Free Software. One way to tackle this 
is to start the manifesto with a summary of the freedoms in a democracy, then 
we could pick out the freedoms that are directly threatened by .NET and co.
* Some points from Philosophy: talk about Passport and address@hidden (the 
DotGNU auth system (yes, the horse race has ended :-)), talk about vendor 
lock-in and ownership of the data.

Greetings,

Peter