În 2013-12-22 22:43, gnu...@lavabit.com a scris:
one more thing: it is related to the thread itself. There are people
who want to ban users simply because they talk about "non-free
software". The problem is, the definition of "free software" is a
little too vague. For me Debian is free, for other people it is not.
Free Software is defined in the Free Software Definition written by RMS
for the GNU Project and first published in the 80's. It is the
definition used by the Trisquel project for free software (as stated in
the Trisquel Community Guidelines) and any other (personal) definition
of free software is out of the scope of this community.
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
A distribution is not only one piece of software, it's a collection of
software. For a certain piece of software it is clear if it's free or
not based on the licenses of all its components and the Free Software
Definition. If theoretically (considering the software licenses) and
practically (considering the technicalities of building and running a
modified version) the user has all the four rights defined in the Free
Software Definition on the entire software she runs in compiled, binary
format, then it's free software.
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
For a software distribution (a system distribution is a subtype of
software distribution) you need to check all the software that is
distributed if it's free software to decide whether the distribution is
free or not. If the distribution also includes non-free software even in
other repositories which are maintained by the distribution project and
which are documented by the distribution project, that that distribution
is not solely a distribution of free software, thus it's a not
(entirely) a free distribution. (I call it a corrupt distribution;
corrupted by the convenience of proprietary software above software
freedom). The FSF has compiled a list of guidelines for a free software
distribution (it might not be complete) based on the issues found
already in the common distributions.
Examples:
Firefox Add-ons (found at addons.mozilla.org) is a software distribution
which is not free, because it includes nonfree extensions for Firefox.
In a similar manner, Debian GNU/Linux is a system distribution which is
not free, because it includes nonfree firmware and other nonfree
software.
--
Tiberiu C. Turbureanu
Președinte, Fundația Ceata
Telefon: +40-761-810-100
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