Birzhan Amirov <john.amirov...@gmail.com> writes: > I just want to use this chance to thank the entire Debian Images Team for > many years of releasing DVDs that actually had 0 bytes of closed-source > code. > I have been following the project since "Jessie", and always admired your > strict and puristic approach. > Allow me to wish you the best of luck growing your user base.
If you actually want the level of purity-over-practicality that your mail suggests, people have been providing it long before you took an interest in Debian -- the FSF keeps a list of candidates: https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html [ Oh, I see gNewSense is dead :-/ , and Trisquel is now (... erm, since 2007 ... obviously wasn't paying attention) based on Ubuntu, which doesn't seem like the most obvious way of doing that, but whatever. ] and while the FSF now criticises Debian primarily on the basis of this (IMO rather minor) change in installer policy: https://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html#Debian they've always been critical of Debian, for pretty-much exactly the same reason as this policy change occurred -- a willingness to let users obtain a working Debian system by providing them with the chance to get hold of non-free software as well as Debian, if that's their only choice: https://web.archive.org/web/20220211101539/https://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html#Debian so if you were expecting FSF levels of purity[1], then you probably haven't been paying close enough attention from the start. While looking at the FSF site, I noticed this somewhat amusing method for reconciling these two stances: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/install-fest-devil.html but I'm afraid I've no idea how one could implement something equivalent in the medium of downloadable images. I'm sure if we had a tool for converting "+firmware" to "pure" images, we'd be publishing the checksums to the "pure" result, and making them easy to get for those that prefer them, but nobody's yet produced such a tool. It really just needs someone to care enough to maintain it (or pay someone else to do so). I don't think we'd go back to the situation where we somehow hide the "+firmware" images though, because we've acknowledged that that is effectively an abuse of our users, so I would expect the FSF to be almost exactly as grumpy even if "pure" images were easily available. Cheers, Phil. [1] of course, the FSF distributes documentation that is non-free by Debian's definition (in the form of GFDL-with-immutable-sections), so other forms of purity are also available :-) -- Philip Hands -- https://hands.com/~phil
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