To celebrate their 25th anniversary, the GNU project has a recording of Stephen Fry wishing them a happy birthday. Which, if you ask me, is pretty cool.
http://www.gnu.org/fry/
Related to that, I found this discussion kind of interesting.
http://blog.dave.org.uk/2008/09/their-own-worst-enemy.html
There's only one problem with the Ogg Theora format - almost no-one
can view it. On most standard installations of Windows and Mac OSX,
there is no software that can play an Ogg Theora file. Which, to my
mind, rather defeats the object of having such a useful marketing
tool.
However, if the Free Software Foundation is only interested in preaching
to the choir, as it were, I don't see anything wrong with this. The
organization has always been steadfast in its belief that Free Software,
and only Free Software, should be used. I can respect that, even if I
don't always agree with it or practice it myself.
Aside from that, I found the most interesting bit of the article to be
the incidental discussion of gNewSense[0].
On investigating gNewSense further, I see that it's a completely new
Linux distribution, because popular distributions like Ubuntu and
Fedora are happy to include proprietary software.
I can't speak for Ubuntu, but Fedora does have certain restrictions on
what can be included.
All software in Fedora must be under licenses in the Fedora
licensing list. This list is based on the licenses approved by the
Free Software Foundation, OSI and consultation with Red Hat
Legal.[1]
Of course, as most users of Fedora are well aware, there exists third
party repositories that provide proprietary software. I can see how
that would rub the FSF the wrong way. However, according to the
gNewSense wiki[2],
gNewSense is a GNU/Linux project that aims to remove all the
non-free software from Ubuntu and Debian to make a 100% Free
Software distribution.
So what's to stop people from adding proprietary Debian or Ubuntu
packages? Okay, obviously that completely misses the point. Anyone who
went to the trouble to install and use gNewSense is not likely to have
any desire to use proprietary software in the first place.
[0] http://www.gnewsense.org/static/homepage/
[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/LicensingGuidelines#Fedora_Licensing
http://tinyurl.com/5vqw4s
[2] http://wiki.gnewsense.org/
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