Gunnar Wolf <[email protected]> writes: > Simon Josefsson dijo [Sat, Feb 21, 2026 at 08:13:07PM +0100]: >>> I guess it all boils down to Debian people not wanting you to badmouth the >>> Debian project using Debian resources for it. >> >>Please help me improve motivation for Debian Libre so it doesn't come >>off as badmouthing. That's not the intention, and to me, the choice of >>basing Debian Libre on Debian speaks a lot about the good things in >>Debian. It would be more work to base a libre OS on macOS or Windows. >> >>What Debian resources are you thinking about? > > If you are proposing a Debian Pure Blend called “Debian Libre”, it would be > using ① Debian's trademark and ② Debian's infrastructure. It would badmouth > the project by implying that full-Debian, that what our project does that > is _not_ accepted by “Debian Libre” is, well... Not free.
I don't follow this. A Debian Libre blend would be curated for a narrow audience that care about a particular topic. It doesn't reject or invalidate anything else in Debian. How is this situation different from any other blends? Do the existance of the Debian Accessibility blend imply what full-Debian does is bad wrt accessibility? Do Debian Edu imply that full-Debian is bad for schools? Just picking two blends out of the list randomly, I'm not familiar with them. Isn't it the reverse? Isn't the fact that Debian enables a curated niche-variant for particular purposes, that only uses a subset of Debian, actually speak in favor of Debian as a good base for generic work? >>> So, go ahead! Scratch your itch! Just don't paint our project as not >>> caring. Because it is not true. >> >>Which statements paint that picture to you? I see a great deal of >>caring about this issue, otherwise there wouldn't have been a GR about >>this in the first place. > > Our project's priorities are its users and free software. And given our > users _will_ predominantly use hardware that won't even boot without > non-free software, and that will expose huge vulnerabilities if not > patched, and that the majority of our users is not as technically apt as > you are, it would be a disservice to make them feel confident in running > only free, auditable, reproducible software when, in fact, they are not. They have the normal official Debian installer images, don't they? > The balance is difficult, yes, and it has changed over the years. And it > might change again in the future. We might have to revise our standing some > years from now. But I do not want a Debian Developer (whom I trust and > whose technical capabilities I admire!) to take 99.5% of Debian and rebrand > it as “Debian Libre”, basically announcing to all of our users that we are > working towards a mediocre goal. I really hope the Debian Libre wouldn't paint that picture to anyone, but instead that it increases the strength in the Debian ecosystem as a foundation for niche uses. If there is something in the communication that could be changed to avoid painting that picture, I'm open to that, as my goal is to do a blend in co-operation with Debian. /Simon
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