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Re: [gNewSense-users] Request for information for my review of gNewSense


From: gnewsense
Subject: Re: [gNewSense-users] Request for information for my review of gNewSense
Date: Tue, 7 Nov 2006 04:16:01 +0100
User-agent: Mutt/1.5.9i

Hi Kevin,

first, this is not an official statement on behalf of the project, but my
opinion on how I percieve the community spirit around it from various 
communications.

On Mon, Nov 06, 2006 at 05:38:53PM -0700, address@hidden wrote:
> Hello bbrazil and ompaul (and anyone else who would like to help me)
> 
> I do reviews for various Linux distros on my website knolinux.com and
> would like to ask a few questions of everyone so that I can put out
> what the real goal of your distro is, since it mainly has the same
> attributes/functions as many other Ubuntu based Linux systems. 
> 
> 1) What is your end goal with gNewSense? 

A long-term sustainable distribution consisting of only Free Software
as it is defined by the FSF.

> 2) I noticed you have FireFox included, does that mean you do not stand
> behind the IceWeasel project and their issues with the FireFox Icon? 

Firefox came along with Dapper, so it's not an active choice at this point.

So far one of the most requested features is indeed the inclusion of
the Iceweasel.
The practical problems are the long time security support and active
maintainance, and being a fledgeling distribution there are little
resources to dedicate to having strictly gNS native packages at the 
moment.

> 3) What are the plans to support PCI (imbedded) Wireless cards for
> laptop users? 

I think a creating a decent list (or aggregating links to decent lists) 
of freedom-compatible hardware has been mentioned.

> 4) With the recent announcement of Novell and several people indicating
> that their new policy of "licensing" to MicroSoft is actually a
> violation of GPL, what will gNewSense do in regards to supporting
> Evolution, Gnome, and and other Novell based software packages not
> mentioned? 

This hasn't been discussed much in our community to my knowledge. 

But if sofware is under the GPL it's under the GPL. And until some party 
tries by force to deny users the rights granted to them under the GPL it's 
mostly just a marketing gimmick and a scare tactic.

> 5) How do you feel about people adding proprietary or non-open source
> packages to your distro in the future and is there any restriction in
> your license restricted said practice? 

Obviously it can never be added to the distribution itself. 
And hopefully our community will prove strong to not setup third-party 
repositories to distribute proprietary software for gNewSense.

The only official project statement so far is a promise to uphold the 
four software freedoms and there have been no such things as for instance 
an equivalent to the Debian social contract formulated yet. 

>From what I gather the FSF is the distribution's philosophical "upstream" 
so I'm not certain whether there will ever be strictly internal ethical 
guidelines regarding freedom. 

> If you don't want to respond that is understandable, but it would really
> help get your message out. 

No problem at all. Thanks for asking and your interest.
 
        Friendly,
        Andreas






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