Re: [gNewSense-users] why we started from the distro we started from

[rek2GNU/Linux]

(beware that I'm a  Spanish speaker...)
What I don't understand is one thing .....
all of this communities (fedora, debian, gentoo...) have people that 
believe firmly  on Free Software totally and others that don't as 
much... and they are divided..
why and why can't be  that ll this people from this 4-5 "linux" distros 
forget about the rpm vs .deb  emacs vs vim for once and  come together 
and create from ground up a new distro? most of you will say *to much 
work...* not really and  if the time we spend complaining about this 
distros we did spend it actually with some creativity and development we 
will succeed, now may if you will will ask/say  *what this have to do 
with the topic in question?*, well is simple
we have the name.. (gnewsense) we have some incentive, we have some 
people (all of us in this list ) why don't we just build a 100% free 
distro from the ground up? I mean is not that difficult trust me..
not to build it.. I have 87 Gentoo servers that I modify for our needs 
(that is why I choose gentoo )  on my company, I know well how to build 
a distro from 0  to 100, so at least
why don't we focus instead of complaining on what distro should we *pull 
from* and let's keep pulling from Ubuntu for now till we can become *our 
own body* with our own character?
in resumen:
lets not worry about if pulling from Ubuntu is ok or not... lets worry 
about one day having our own voice and not dependent on decisions of 
other developers in other distros that don't really care about the 
freedom we desire.. *lot of work* but we have a lot of passion that is 
something that can move mountains :-)


my 2 cents..
*** runs away under a rock before people hit me with rocks ***

Chris Fernandez





Dave Crossland wrote:
> On 20/11/06, Paul O'Malley <address@hidden> wrote:
> > In Nov 2005 RMS met Mark S at the WIPO gig in Tunis.
>
> I've been thinking about this. While Mark Shuttleworth himself seems
> very committed to Free Software above 'Open Source' - in the panel
> session he shared with RMS at that WIPO gig in Tunis he promoted FS
> over OS for example - Ubuntu and Canonical are clearly not as
> committed to Free Software.
>
> I can see that this faltering committment may be strategic - if Ubuntu
> gets several million users by dishing out gratis LiveCDs it may have
> lobbying force to - say - get GPL graphics card drivers released. But
> this is a case of 'the ends justify the means', and I personally
> disagree with this anyway. Plus lately, the deals with VMWare and Real
> and Opera and Mozilla I can't see as being strategic at all.
> Especially when they don't include GPL MP3 decoders...
>
> So I'm not sure that Ubuntu is the best base to chose to take 100% Free.
>
> gNewSense struggles to remove Ubuntu's non-free packages - though the
> gNewSense repository meets a basic level of freeness,
> WINE/ndiswrapper/etc aside, the 'Add/Remove' interface on the
> Applications menu has a 'Show Commecial Applications" tickbox and
> prominently displays RealPlayer even though it is not available in the
> gNewSense repositories. (I just filed this as a bug :-)
>
> The real unique thing that you core gNewSense developers have done is
> to put a lot of excellent work into removing proprietary firmware from
> the Linux kernel. But this will be an ongoing struggle, since it is
> included by the kernel.org upstream maintainers, and Ubuntu certainly
> will not be helping this effort.
>
> Debian has just been suggested as a 'better base' than Ubuntu, but 
> looking at
>
> http://www.debian.org/vote/2006/vote_007
>
> it appears that this is unlikely to change anytime soon. And Debian's
> non-free  repositories will also need to be struggled against.
>
> However, Fedora already has 100% free repositories sorted out,
> according to http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FreeSoftwareAnalysis and is
> about to cross check this.
>
> Fedora is still not as free as gNewSense, because it has an explicit
> policy of including firmware, like Debian:
>
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines#head-adf31c383612aac313719f7b4f8167b7dcf245d2 
>
>
> So, I would like to confirm that the firmware gNewSense removes from
> Ubuntu is only in the Linux kernel.
>
> If this is the case, I would also like to gently tender the suggestion
> that gNewSense also consider a Builder for Fedora that ports its 100%
> Free Kernel that way.
>
> --
> Regards,
> Dave
>
>
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