Let me share my humble personal thoughts on this subject as a reader of this list.
Dave Crossland wrote: > > I believe this is a useful suggestion for the gnewsense, and perhaps > even GNU, website; that is, explaining to other GNU+Linux > distributions what proprietary software the include, I admit this idea crossed my mind too in the past (without the linking part), because from time to time people ask "Please list the Foo distro" or "Why Bar is not listed?". However, I quickly concluded that such a page would be unnecessary, because... > so they could get rid of it, ...the presence of non-free software in most of the distros is not something that happened by accident or as a result of not knowing what to do. It is pretty much a deliberate decision and a policy of these projects. Recently, a new article has been uploaded: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html It can be used as an aid (although the guidelines do not go in much detail) by those distributors who are willing to make their distros entirely free. > would help them to become fully free. As I said, the main thing that would help them to become fully free is their determination to become fully free. This is the most important thing, and all technical decisions should stem from that determination, IMO. > I would have them list any and all GNU/Linux distributions and > comment and constructively criticise them in that listing, like they > do with licences. After all, no-one seriously claims FSF is > recommending the Jahia Community Source License, do they? Now this is something that cannot be really comparable. It is useful to have a list with licenses, because it is not obvious for everyone in which category a particular license falls. In addition, there is the important distinction of free software licenses that are incompatible with the GPL, which is even harder to determine (as opposed to whether it is free or not). Most of the conclusions in the license-list at gnu.org have required serious thought and consultation with lawyers. By contrast, it is elementary to figure out why Debian, Slackware, RHEGL, SGLES, etc. do not classify for the list of free GNU/Linux distros, even without the necessity to deduce the requirements from the newly published guidelines. I think nearly every free software supporter knows why they're not on the list. It's just plain obvious. So if we imagine such a hypothetical article, "distro-list", it would actually be one paragraph, because all distros listed will share one thing in common, with very minor nuances. license-list is something different, and its purpose is different. _______________________________________________ gNewSense-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnewsense-users
