Subject: bug#37267: 27.0.50; Menus About GNU and GNU and Freedom to be made offline

From: Jean Louis <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 3 Sep 2019 08:01:27 +0200

* Richard Stallman <[email-masked]> [2019-09-03 07:36]:
> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
> 
> We used to include copies of such articles in /etc.
> I removed them, thinking that it was better to refer to the web.
> I wanted to remove something from the Emacs distro that I
> thought was superfluous.
> 
> Based on what you've just said, maybe we should include
> copies of the most important articles in the Emacs distribution,
> as before.
> 
> Perhaps we should also include
> https://gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-important.html
> and https://gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.html.

Please think of the time when Emacs was distributed on CD, or
diskette, people did not have Internet.

It was for many a line to find out about the free software.

All those distributions and dissemination of free software was
targetting mostly developed countries. I remember in Germany
1997-1998, it was hard to obtain the set of GNU CDs, and even then,
just few of them were available in the major library, and quickly
sold.

Today in Western countries, more or less, free software has got it
place and position in space and time, and it is politically recognized
within European Union, well known in North Americas and I would say to
good degree in South Americas.

If I think just of 3 countries in East Africa, Uganda, Kenya and
Tanzania, that is already about 150 million people, about little less
than half of the US population, and free software is almost
unknown. Yes, many people have smart phones there, but Internet is
expensive for many students, and they have no possibility to access
those menus with Internet links.

Emacs is still mainly offline editor, thus offline Help and "About
GNU" shall give the offline resource, not online resource.

And if online resource is important, than one can make 2 menus, one
online, one offline.

The menu item "About GNU" points to https://www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.html

I consider "The GNU Project" important for those professors in
universities which could be the driving force to convert all
university into free software and understand how it can impact all the
country.

>From Western viewpoint, maybe every school has access to Internet, but
that is not so.

Universities in East Africa often do not have their fixed phone lines,
unspoken from Internet lines, and may be far deep in the jungle where
no fixed Internet line comes in.

Busitema[1] university is just after the Busitema forest[2], resources
are scarce in the area, student live in campus and live on little
money.

If we think of people who do not have Internet, at least not all the
time, we shall provide them with offline articles, such as "About GNU"
in the main Emacs menu, under Help, which is major one to understand
the roots of free software.

We should look from viewpoint of those new areas in the world where
nobody knows about free software, where proprietary is not dominant,
we could rather say "almost absolute".

Jean

Footnotes:
[1]  http://www.busitema.ac.ug

[2]  https://ugandatourismcenter.com/place/busitema-forest/