On 21.06.2017 12:22, Erik Albers wrote:
Hi all,
Maybe you noted in the Newsletter May [1] a pro and contra between our Executive Director and our Fellowship representative:
On the FSFE's Planet, we had an interesting dialogue popping up between our executive director Jonas Öberg who argues that sometimes you can use proprietary software to further free and open source software [2] although you should be aware about the risk of backfiring. And Daniel Pocock, our new Fellowship representative, answered with "the risk of proprietary software" [3] and that "no deal might be better than a bad deal", meaning that if you cannot achieve something with Free Software you should consider just doing without it.
In our European core team we are having a lively discussion now about the pros and cons of using proprietary software platforms like Facebook, Meetup, Twitter and alike to send out our message of software freedom.
You may have noticed that the FSFE for example runs a Twitter-account. We do this under some rules but in particular under the rule that these "services are an addition to the FSFE's communication channels and not a replacement. The teams have to make sure to always provide the information accessible by using Free Software without pushing people to create accounts on proprietary platform."
Means that every information on a proprietary platform is only a mulitiplication of information that is given somewhere else, accessible and created with Free Software.
Now I would be interested what you think? Do you think that - although the use of proprietary platforms is ethically not supportable - the chances of convincing new people to use and further Free Software are worth the punishment? Or do you think that our message should not occur on platforms like Facebook or Twitter at all, because it contradicts our efforts in getting people to use decentralized services, run with Free Software and therefore potentially harm us in the long run?
Thank you for sharing your opinions on this, Erik
[1] https://fsfe.org/news/nl/nl-201705 [2] http://blog.jonasoberg.net/using-proprietary-software-for-freedom/ [3] https://danielpocock.com/risks-of-using-proprietary-software
I think treating them as second class could be OK:
1. post on a free software platform 2. don't reply on twitter or facebook, just link to the original
-Robert