[Arm-netbook] Standards Organization as a Potentially Universal Free/Libre Software Developement Sustenance Model

[Jean Flamelle]

On 7/13/17, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl at lkcl.net> wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 13, 2017 at 2:11 PM, Jean Flamelle <eaterjolly at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Meh, I don't really think myself ready to write this kind of a document.
>> I really don't know as much as I'd like to on the topic.
>
>  well... would you like to help evaluate some of the long-standing
> well-known free software projects out there?   i vaguely recall making
> a list a few weeks ago.  we need a table showing what "features" each
> of them has.  do they use mailing lists, do they have a forum, do they
> have a charter, do they have a "code of conduct" *shudder*, do they
> properly honour free software licenses or do they have some sort of
> unethical "forced contributor agreement" (oracle in particular).
>
> a comparison of pre and post forks for major projects such as x11 /
> xorg, openoffice / libreoffice, mysql / mariadb, and so on, would be
> really *really* interesting and informative.
>
> l.

I would be glad to do that!
I think it would be very important to focus on projects that create
software or firmware, which are of particular relevance to
non-programmers. I think this because they'll likely be under
significantly disproportionate proportionate pressure compared to the
amount of contributions to code that they receive. Blender, Gimp, and
Aperture, are just a few that come to mind immediately, but projects
like RISC-V and Kicad would arguably also count since there are still
large portions of their audiences likely specialize very far away from
the type of software programming knowledge required to contribute.

I think for most people the inclination to donate to any software
projects fiscally, would be predictable (with a high confidence value)
by the the ratio of technical programming knowledge and their
dependence on the software created by that project. For that reason
you could also say, it would be a higher priority to evaluate gnome as
as a software project than debian, because ubuntu is more often
pitched to a less technical audience. Of course, the fsf already
evaluates distributions and doesn't endorse ubuntu anyway, so it would
probably be perceived in really bad taste if the libre community
started listing reasons why they gave gnome a poor evaluation score if
that was the outcome, so I suppose it would be best to avoid it all
together and only evaluate desktop environments as software projects
if the are made available in an fsf-endorsed distribution by default.
(I know I've heard people say trisquel is based on ubuntu, but I don't
know what desktop environment it uses by default).

All in all, for a base, I think aperture would be a good starting
point, since GIMP and Blender get a lot of flack that aperture doesn't
atm. I realize most of what they are doing is hardware, but their is a
lot of firmware involved. Also, I haven't heard very many complaints
about inkscape, so that would be a decent one to start with. I'm
hesitant to talk about OpenShot or libreoffice early on, because they
are (as we like to say in the wikipedia community) POV-forks than
independent projects. In other words, it's impossible to honestly and
sincerely evaluate LibreOffice as a project without comparing it to
OpenOffice and likewise OpenShot to Blender and in small part
Audacity.

Since I don't feel especially confident in my ability handling this
topic, I would probably sooner get feedback through this thread than
add any "evaluations" I make straight to the wiki. Because of this, I
think it's important I start by documenting on which ever of the "good
candidate" projects attracts the most interest in this thread, at
least on the philosophical level of how they "go about their business"
if not on a fundamental level of "I really like this project".