On 30/12/14 14:13, Isaac David Reyes González wrote: > "Better" is very broad. Most people in these lists would see the GPL as an > advantage, but none would deny that Clang or LLVM are essentially free and > compatible (maybe after some proofreading work) with the FSF's Free System > Distribution Guidelines. As much as I prefer GCC and the GNU GPL in > general, I wouldn't like to see precious efforts going to porting your > OpenBSD spinoff back to GCC before actually making it a wholly free system. > Not that I'm going to tell you how to spend your time, but getting a wholly > free BSD is obviously the real issue here. > > To be honest I like the idea of staying as close as possible to upstream > OpenBSD while also meeting the FSF standards, so OpenBSD users feel > attracted to make the jump. I think this was your original intention. If > manpower is scarce, ask no more and keep Clang (assuming it doesn't need > further liberation-wise tuning). There are some points that I would like to > ask though, because your emails and website didn't clarify them for me:
Thanks. This is exactly what I was trying to get across. > How do we know beforehand that LibertyBSD is actually compliant with the > FSDG? Why are you so confident that it will make it to the FSF list? Don't > get me wrong, I don't underestimate your work and knowledge but I'm afraid > that my donation might go to a dead end. I think going a bit more technical > about what you are deblobbing and how you achieve it helps. While I can't confirm for certain that LibertyBSD will make the FSF list, I can confirm that I will try to make any changes the FSF deems necessary. As for what I have done in terms of deblobbing, I have: *Removed the binary-only firmware *Made kernel and other minor modifications to get around this *Renamed various parts of the distribution from OpenBSD to LibertyBSD (the uname has been kept as "OpenBSD" for compatibility reasons). There isn't much more to it than that. I've got > Assuming some trusted third party reviews your work and confirms it is > libre, how will LibertyBSD be maintained? I look at all the work that > Parabola hackers for instance undergo in order to clean up a GNU/Linux > distro that is allegedly easy to clean, and I tell myself "Hell, this is > though". Have you considered building a community? Some organisation like > the FSF might want to help you complete the crowdfunding, but then what? I expect that it will be quite easy to maintain. One release will be provided roughly every 6 months (to track OpenBSD's release schedule). Compared to maintaining Parabola, maintaining LibertyBSD should be easy. OpenBSD policy forbids non-free software from going into the base system. (Microcode is an exception to this, since OpenBSD developers do not see it as software.) I just need to keep the diffs between OpenBSD and LibertyBSD and slightly modify them for each new version.