On 1/6/08 11:46 AM, Richard Stallman wrote:
By using and endorsing gNewSense???
It seems you really don't read what's going on there, people working on it
more or less scream out it's an impossible mission the way it's setup now and
the project goals are not met for the foreseeable future.
I don't read the gNewSense discussion lists -- I don't have time. But
I did read the pages that someone forwarded to this list yesterday,
and I saw nothing shocking in them. They simply acknowledge that
mistakes are possible.
You are looking at the details mistakes there are not interesting, not
everyone is morally defect in this world!
What's interesting is that they admit they cannot find all blobs without truly
reading and understanding the code, they lack people for it. They haven't seen
any users question/discussion for a really long time. And above all "But using
a distribution which bases on a quite good distribution (in the sense of
freeness) and adds non-free components looks like a bad decision."
(It's about Ubuntu, based on Debian, that adds non-free components without
questions being asked.)
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnewsense-users/2007-11/msg00042.html
with:
I don't know how to "find" binary blobs. I dont' know what they look
like in the source, so I'm almost totally useless as to determining
non-license freedom - Brian's Builder tools are very limited to the
version of the kernel gNewSense uses and will have to be re-tooled to
handle the newer versions that future versions will be built. Because
of this, despite our PFV we're still not 100% sure that user's
freedoms are fully protected.
and Brian Brazil:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnewsense-users/2007-11/msg00047.html
Fundamentally, I don't believe a technical solution will help to resolve
what is essentially a legal and social issue. While it would be nice to have
an automated tool to verify licenses, the area as a whole has a large number
of people with greatly differing visions of what freedom is and isn't. Add in
things like detecting non-free items embedded in otherwise free code
and you've got something that is, at best, a very meaty research project.
Or:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnewsense-users/2007-11/msg00044.html
We clearly have relied too much on the Debian copyright file, so I
suppose a big help would be an automated way of classifying or
clustering files in a package based on their license comments.
This is from less than 2 months ago.
You clearly cannot holdup that gNewSense is up to your standards, even the
basics are not in place. You don't have a good source. Based on GPLvX you
don't have the people to get it in place within years.
If your ideas about software are so important for you as you say you would
step over to OpenBSD today and live to your principles for the rest of your
life without saying again and again "I will ask" "I will check" "I made a
small mistake", "can you point me at", "they told me", "I don't think the
words quoted are my exact words.", "I don't personally do most of our web site
maintenance", "I will discuss".
+++chefren
