From: "Rob ." <rob.02004@...>
Date: 2005-05-07T00:36:36+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby Editor Plugin for jEdit 0.6.1 - method completion release II

Karl, the UK political material was put on the plugin download site as
it is topical to the last two days and the UK election coincided with
the 0.6 release (I stayed up all night working to make sure it did).
It'll probably be replaced with a "no software patents in Europe"
banner this weekend.  ;-)

There is however some relevance to free software. The Liberal Democrat
party supports the use of open source software in government, and of
using the open source approach in government projects. I believe Lib
Dem members also oppose changing EU law to allow the patenting of
software.

Since the Lib Dems support free software, I didn't mind using a free
software project to support them. To quote their policy docs
<http://www.makeitpolicy.org.uk/PP-Services-OpenSource.html>:

"a collaborative system in which large numbers of developers can
freely share their work can be of enormous benefit. This has often not
been the case to date with, for example, IT specialists in large
public organisations like the NHS (National Health Service) working
separately to solve the same problems but unable to pool their results
because they are tied in to separate proprietary system suppliers.

Wherever possible consideration should be given to the benefits of
placing software elements into the public domain and developing them
collaboratively amongst the whole developer and user community."

Rob

On 5/6/05, Karl von Laudermann <doodpants@mailinator.com> wrote:
> Rob . wrote:
> > Version 0.6.1 of jEdit's Ruby Editor Plugin has been released and is
> > available for download!
> >
> > For details and downloads go to:
> >
> >    http://www.jedit.org/ruby/
> 
> I like what you're doing, and as someone who uses jEdit as my primary
> source editor for Ruby, I think it's great.
> 
> However, and I don't know about anyone else, I'm rather put off by the
> political banners that you have at the above site. I don't think that
> the download site for a software tool is the appropriate place to make
> a political statement. Plus, not everyone who visits the site is in the
> UK, so your plea to vote for a particular party doesn't apply to most
> people who will see it.
>