Fwd: Re: GNU Herds vs RMS/FSF -- joining both

[Davi Leal]

----------  Forwarded Message  ----------

Subject: Re: GNU Herds vs RMS/FSF -- joining both
Date: Friday 02 May 2008
From: Matt Lee <address@hidden>
To: Dave Crossland <address@hidden>, address@hidden

Dave Crossland wrote:

> Matt has a kind of 'inside joke' where he accuses people of "hating
> freedom" - for example,  free software developers contributing to BSD
> distributions.

er.. what? I don't accuse BSD people of that at all.

Here, I was trying to understand what the issue was with the FSF
charging $250 for a job posting. Davi's opinion is that $250 to put up a
job listing is a 'tax'. As John and others said, it is a good way to
raise funds for the FSF.

> In my opinion he ought not to taunt people like this because although
> I believe he intends this to be humorous exaggeration, it doesn't
> always come across like that.

FYI, the people I 'accuse' of hating freedom, are people I'm friendly
with and as such take it as a joke. If you didn't, then I'm sorry.

> Similarly here, I think it is unfortunate that he has made an
> accusation that an active GNU hacker is "against the FSF" because you
> don't like the single high fee for job listings on the FSF website. I
> think the FSF jobs site is good for hiring people for full time
> employment or very large jobs, but connecting users who want features
> and have money with developers - as GNU Herds does - is something that
> ought to be as costless as possible (and there are costs other than
> money)

Okay. Dave, stop. False accusations are not cool.

Asking if someone is against the FSF does not equal an accusation.

You are correct however, in the different goals of the FSF jobs page and
the GNU Herds jobs page. A place where projects can ask for volunteers
wouldn't work at $250, and that's not what we're doing here.

We've created a place for people who are looking for contractors or
salaried employees, working on or more likely with, free software. These
people can pay $250.. lots of other job sites charge more than this. By
charging less, we hope they will post their jobs will us, but it is
certainly something the market will bear.

I'm sorry if there was any misunderstanding there, but I really don't
think you should be accusing me of accusing anyone of hating the FSF. I
asked if Davi was against the FSF.

Taking one line out of an entire discussion that wasn't clear in the
first place, out of context and using it as a reason to bash me over the
head for a joke I make with my friends. Wow.

Further down the conversation...

<mattl> davi: if the job page was using the gnuherds software, but still
              charged $250, would you be happy?

<davi>  mattl, That would be a start

So, now I'm really confused.

I think GNU Herds is building what might be described these days as a
social network. It's a community of users built around sharing, and jobs
is just one part of that. That's a great thing. The FSF Jobs page is
quite literally, a place for people to list paid job openings, usually
for full time, salaried jobs, but also for contractors. Not all these
jobs will be jobs that directly feed back to Free Software Projects, but
rather, they're jobs for people who know and use free software.

> So I hope you'll ignore this kind of thing, Davi; I think GNU Herds is
> an important project, I used it already to find a developer for a
> small programming job, and would not have afforded the fee charged by
> the FSF to get that work done - it is almost half the cost of the
> work.

Great! Nobody's saying GNU Herds shouldn't exist.

I do think, however, that the current FSF job listing stuff could be
improved with some of the concepts GNU Herds is using. The FSF is using
Django, and so I think that if possible for Davi to rewrite GNU Herds in
Django, that could be a useful thing for both the project (as Django
makes it pretty simple to add new things and gives you a lot of stuff
out of the box, such as admin interfaces and such), and potentially the
FSF if we ever decide to develop our jobs page beyond the current,
manual procedure.


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