Re: State of the GNUnion 2020

Le jeudi 20 février 2020, 18:39:52 CET Samuel Thibault a écrit :
> Alfred M. Szmidt, le jeu. 20 févr. 2020 12:32:16 -0500, a ecrit:
> >    > > Our concern is that at some point GNU may be just completely
> >    > > unknown
> >    > > to free software enthousiasts. As in, when you'd ask people
> >    > > what free
> >    > > software is about, they would answer "ah, yes, the stuff on
> >    > > github,
> >    > > right".
> >    > 
> >    > Okay, sure. But going back to Eli's point, the development
> >    > activity of
> >    > individual projects is determined by individual project's
> >    > members, and is rarely affected by the actions of the
> >    > leadership.
> >    
> >    The activity by itself, yes, but the choice of where to start a new
> >    project, or starting contributing an existing project, leadership
> >    does
> >    have a lot of importance.
> > 
> > How does that have to do with the overall project leadership, which
> > hasn't changed significantly over the years, and yet had significant
> > growth in new projects for several decades (if we take the graphs by
> > Wingo at face value).
> 
> "Significant growth" is very little compared to the huge growth that can
> be seen on other platforms.

So when measuring we should only dare to measure GNU stuff in comparison 
with other software projects and platforms.  Very interesting.

> I'm not saying that GNU will necessarily stop growing and decline. What
> I'm afraid is that it might just become insignificant compared to
> others, and thus its voice for the 4 freedoms become less and less
> heard.

That’s a reasonable fear, so that should be what should have been measured 
in the metrics discussed in this thread.