No, F-Spot, Tomboy, and Mono are all free software using Stallman's definition. And Gnome does not bundle any proprietary software. The issue is about favourably mentioning non-free software, such as VmWare, on the Gnome blog aggregator.
The suggestion by someone for a split-from-GNU vote is a response to Stallman's email. In his email, Stallman says: (excerpt)
But GNOME is part of the GNU Project, and it ought to support the free software movement. The most minimal support for the free software movement is to refrain from going directly against it; that is, to avoid presenting proprietary software as legitimate.
To which Philip Van Hoof replied: (excerpt)
You, as one of the key FSF people, appear to be keen on enforcing a strict policy on how GNU's member-projects should behave. So ...
I propose to have a vote on GNOME's membership to the GNU project.
Thank you all for the explanations. But, basically rbanffy is right ?
According to that email and what I read here, they want to split just because GNOME promoted proprietary software on their blog ?
But there's one thing I still don't get. Even if they split, what's the big deal ?
It would send a message - that the developers of Gnome don't think being Stallman-like free is not a big deal.
If, however, they do entertain such toughts, I will start using the "free as in Stallman" fork that will, undoubtedly, become available the week following the inclusion of any not-very-free software and that will be maintained by many of the same developers who do it today, with a lot of common code between forks.
