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Re: [Fsuk-manchester] Ubuntu !free


From: MJ Ray
Subject: Re: [Fsuk-manchester] Ubuntu !free
Date: Tue, 13 May 2008 10:38:49 +0100
User-agent: Heirloom mailx 12.2 01/07/07

Dave Love <address@hidden> wrote:
> "aidy lewis" <address@hidden> writes:
> > In last night's lecture Stallman gave some examples of free GNU
> > distros. Ubuntu was not one of them.
>
> Nor Fedora or Debian.  (Note that Debian reciprocates -- it's ripped out
> stuff I wrote and/or put under the GFDL, which means Emacs is broken in
> several ways, at least without the `non-free' repo you don't realize you
> need stuff from.)

Please, if it's an essential part of Emacs, dual-license it under the
GPL so that it can always be included with Emacs in any distribution.

(For those unfamiliar with the FDL problems, it is not a free software
licence and I don't think it was ever meant to be, as RMS has written
that such concerns don't make sense to him.)
http://mjr.towers.org.uk/blog/2006/fdl#general

[...]
> There are two issues as far as I know; they don't concern the licences
> of the basic distribution.  One concerns non-free firmware present in,
> or with, the kernel required to make various devices function.  The
> other is they recommend, or facilitate the use of, repos of non-free
> software (Debian's non-free and more blatant `partner' stuff in the case
> of Ubuntu).

As far as I can recall, FSF still doesn't distribute a complete
operating system itself, so it's easy for it to throw stones at the
glass houses of debian and others about the Linux kernel firmwares.
debian contributors seem to have been striving to find how much they
can work on that without souring relations with the upstream Linux
kernel hackers (which could break stuff in other ways).

It is a serious bug for any part of the debian operating system (=the
main repository on the FTP archive and the only bit on the official
CDs and DVDs) to Recommend anything from non-free.  Debian no more
recommends non-free software than FSF does when it mentions that
such-and-such is available for Microsoft Windows.  I thought FSF's
complaint was that the debian project (not the OS) hosts some non-free
software packages on its archive network, but most of the GNU
project's mirror network hosts non-free software packages too and
no-one's managed to split debian's ftp-master into two systems (one
for main, another for the rest) yet.

The biggest problem with most FSF-recommended "!debian" distributions
has been that they have included blatently non-free software like the
old anti-commercial mpg123 (Ututo did this), or the nvidious drivers
(Ututo again), or Adobe Acrobat, or Sun Java in the past, simply
because their developer communities were too small and too newbie to
realise these famous examples weren't free software.

Also, the small distributions tended not to have public/searchable bug
trackers (gNewSense is maybe the first) and people recommending it for
FSF seem not to have checked them closely before "harming" FSF's image
by recommending distributions which have non-free software in their
main distribution.  It comes down to who do you trust: FSF with their
history of good philosophy and poor recommendations; or the debian
project with its admitted bugs but free software goal in the social
contract?

Hope that explains,
-- 
MJ Ray (slef)
Webmaster for hire, statistician and online shop builder for a small
worker cooperative http://www.ttllp.co.uk/ http://mjr.towers.org.uk/
(Notice http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html) tel:+44-844-4437-237




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