While we're all on this subject (or were, I left for a couple hours), hand in hand the philosophy that systems should crash loudly, apt, ports, whatever (if ports doesn't already) should loudly yell at the user (the same level of fear pushed with "this is cvs code this may break your system so don't complain!!" since blobs can be just as scary if not scarier[1]) when closed-source software is about to be installed. These are free operating systems and like in a (truly) free society people will do very stupid things with their freedom. Regardless of system be it ututo ubuntu or OpenBSD, including or excluding blobs in a package list makes _very_ little difference.
The systems should inform users (or just flag to sys admins yo this is a blob) with something along the lines of: "You and your system are now at the complete mercy of this vendor's competence and self-interested wishes, expect to be degraded to the shit standard of a windows or mac system, this is an extreme risk[1], would you like to continue? =)" along with a link to the "Vendor Reasons and Excuses, The Bullshit" presentation ( http://www.openbsd.org/papers/opencon06-docs/mgp00020.txt). This type of warning would deliver both the moral and practical reasons while letting them re-enforce each other as they so well do still being completely and properly interpreted regardless of camp you're in. Just like we allegedly got whatever large percentage of the population off smoking cigs, the GNU camp isn't going to get people off proprietary software through omissions and on-the-side education. All camps can only do so much through lobbying to get access to specifications. You gotta get not just your well-informed users on this but let your average zomg-*nix-is-leet-transparent-terminals!-guy able to make an informed opinion too through bold red-lettered "this is lung cancer in a box" stickers to shift the consensus in your favors regardless of your motivations, whether they be moral (mercy of someone else sucks) or practical (having more people screaming/initiating for specs). I think all package managers list licenses in package info to be helpful to everyone (those wanting to using a whole OpenBSD system for a "product" would probably appreciate this the most) and scare the users with capitol letters about how they're doing something stupid/scary[1] every time they do. [1]: I don't think I have to explain to this group how much blobs suck. This is something constructive both camps (along with all of us) with little effort would possibly greatly benefit from. I'm sure the vast minority of us are sick of having to deal with binary blobs when we are stuck between them and paperweighting hardware because the vast majority are willing to put up with them or don't have it shoved into their collective consciousness that this is bullshit we are putting up with here and that this could and should be solved. On Dec 15, 2007 1:36 PM, Richard Stallman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > The Adobe flash plug-in is non-free software, and people should not > > install it, or suggest installing it, or even tell people it exists. > > so much for free speech. > > Free speech means you are free to tell people about the Adobe flash > plug-in, and also free to decide not to tell them. > > I exercise my freedom of speech by not telling people about the Adobe > flash plug-in. I think you should, too. But I will not try to force > you to do that, because I respect your freedom of speech.
