On Sat, Mar 21, 2015 at 07:09:50PM +0200, Lars Noodén wrote: > On 21.03.2015 18:51, Linuxito wrote: > > Great reading. I knew RMS would answer something like that to that > > question, if it's licensed under GPL, it's free software, period. > > ( Actually it's LGPL [1] but ... ) > > I expect that he is thinking about it and will be thinking about it a > while longer before he comes up with a formal position on this > particular piece of nastiness. On the issues of "tivoization" and > proprietary javascript he was able to come up with something. Here the > situation is not much different, but the method being (ab)used is > obfuscation. The code base is so overwhelmingly massive, convoluted, > uncommented, and undocumented that it is very effectively obfuscated and > closed. For all the other bad things that systemd does, it violates the > spirit of the GPL on two levels: freedom 0 and freedom 1. > > - the hard dependencies prevent programs from being run as one wishes > - the obfuscated code prevents studying and changing, for nearly all >
Well, we might all agree on despising the systemd-nonsense on a technical level, but nobody can say it's not free software without being considered a fool. The systemd-nonsense is distributed with a free software license, therefore it *is* free software. Anybody can use, distribute, modify and redistribute modified versions of the systemd-nonsense, so all the four essential freedoms of the definition of Free Software are guaranteed. Fullstop. The case of tivo is *extremely* and *fundamentally* different, so please just let's try avoiding mixing up oil and water, since we can't succeed, and produces only confusion and endless discussions. The answer of RMS is quite normal and expected: he is devoted his entire life to the fight for software freedom, and the systemd-nonsense is a free (nonsense) software, so what kind of opinion do you expect from him? After all, nobody has *forced* all the distibutions to adopt the systemd-nonsense, and nobody could. It was a *free* choice, even if we agree that it has probably been a stupid one, and it can virtually be reverted at any time (and this is what Devuan is actually trying to do). What is strange in the report made by Jaromil is the fact that just asking a question about the systemd-nonsense classifies you as a troll, which is quite unusual in the free software community. Let's keep calm, and avoid fuss. HND KatolaZ -- [ Enzo Nicosia aka KatolaZ --- GLUG Catania -- Freaknet Medialab ] [ me [at] katolaz.homeunix.net -- http://katolaz.homeunix.net -- ] [ GNU/Linux User:#325780/ICQ UIN: #258332181/GPG key ID 0B5F062F ] [ Fingerprint: 8E59 D6AA 445E FDB4 A153 3D5A 5F20 B3AE 0B5F 062F ] _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list Dng@lists.dyne.org https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng