>>                                    Setting it as a precondition to a
>> meeting gives Mr Stallman what appears (to me at least) to be a holier
>> than thou attitude.

>Agree with him or not, RMS has chosen some important principles which
>happen to be uncomfortable for many of us, and he is living by them
>and preaching them wherever he goes.  He not just _appears_ to be,
>but he actually is 'holier than thou' in this respect.

>florin

I believe the point is if he wishes to "enlighten" us non zealots he should
do it in a less abrasive manner. He could have been more polite about the
request instead of making it ultimatum-ish. Of course how he conducts his
business is his business. Right or wrong in his message he just continues to
rub people the wrong way with his apparent ungraceful social skills. This
may be the first interaction with RMS for many and he appears to be doing
more damage to his reputation than good. Maybe that is his intent so as to
spark more conversations, if so he is doing a very good job. Perhaps though
his comments/intention were just misunderstood, or maybe he was in a rush
with his reply and therefore did not put full thought and analysis as we are
into his words, people do make mistakes.

All personal things aside, I believe changing the name is not the best
choice. People have listed off good points both for and against the name
change and I believe that making the name change implicitly alters the
intention of the group as a whole. From reading the website and mostly
lurking on this list it does not appear that the group is designed or
intended to be GNU publicists or even free software publicists. Our goals do
not seem to match those of RMS's. Of course some/many/all here are for the
general principals that RMS is for but does that mean this specific user
group is the best front to propagate the messages of RMS campaign.

If people feel strongly enough about the movement RMS leads, feel free to
make your own group which could share a common user base and certainly the
two could co-exist with each other and have URLs and references to each
other and what not.

Most "distributions" contain GNU software, Linux kernel, other non-GNU free
software, other non-GPL free software, and proprietary non-free software.
Let's keep the TCLUG group focused on users using the software we
collectively call "Linux" be it any of the GNU and non-GNU bits.