New distribution: gNewSense 1.0 [LWN.net]

New distribution: gNewSense 1.0

Posted Nov 2, 2006 15:18 UTC (Thu) by Felix_the_Mac (subscriber, #32242)
Parent article: New distribution: gNewSense 1.0

I respect these people for acting on their principles.

Whilst I don't expect this to make a big splash, I think it unfortunate from a PR point of view for Ubuntu. We all know how minor issues can get blown out of proportion within the FOSS community.

I would suggest the Cannonical don't ignore this but rather reach out to gNewSense and 'bless' it by linking to it from ubuntu.com and putting up a useful article explaining exactly what the differences are.

Alternatively they could go one step further and do this in house (hopefully in such a way as to have the support of the gNewSense team).
So they could build images which are identical to K/Ed/Ubuntu but excluding binary blobs. (I hereby give them the right to call it 'Ubuntu Pure' :-)

Also in the standard installer have a question near the start saying 'Tick here if you don't want to install any non-gpl material'.

N.B. I don't know anything about the freedom 'issues' with Launchpad.

(Log in to post comments)

s/non-gpl/non-free/

Posted Nov 2, 2006 15:31 UTC (Thu) by GreyWizard (subscriber, #1026) [Link]

The Free Software Foundation has never had a problem with free software that is not licensed under the GPL and is unlikley to insist on doing without such things.

New distribution: gNewSense 1.0

Posted Nov 2, 2006 15:36 UTC (Thu) by ewan (subscriber, #5533) [Link]

N.B. I don't know anything about the freedom 'issues' with Launchpad.

It's non-free. That's basically the issue.

New distribution: gNewSense 1.0

Posted Nov 2, 2006 16:26 UTC (Thu) by TxtEdMacs (subscriber, #5983) [Link]

"... That's basically the issue."

I beg to differ: I use Ubuntu, more than one distribution on more than one machine. Care to enlighten us as to what Launchpad is?

New distribution: gNewSense 1.0

Posted Nov 2, 2006 18:13 UTC (Thu) by Los__D (subscriber, #15263) [Link]

In short: Commercial Bugzilla alternative that Ubuntu uses for bug reporting.

Launchpad appears to be a website

Posted Nov 2, 2006 18:16 UTC (Thu) by grantingram (subscriber, #18390) [Link]

Well as far as I understand it launchpad is the website that Ubuntu (and others apparently) use to do their development with. The blurb on their site claims it is "Launchpad is a collection of services for products in the open source universe."

What I don't understand is why this is an issue for the FSF. There is no obligation to distribute your web-site software in the four freedoms so I'm not sure what they are on about!

Launchpad appears to be a website

Posted Nov 3, 2006 3:08 UTC (Fri) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Well I don't think that they are making a issue of it aside from the fact that they don't want anything to do with it.

I don't know how much influance RMS has over FSF, but the basic idea that he has is that when you have a software distro that provides non-free software it is a non-free operating system. Every system including Fedora and Debian endorse non-free software in one manner or another. (non-free and contrib repositories for instance)

Their explicit goal is to make a Free operating system. If people want to use propriatory software on a system I don't think they have a problem with it nor do they think that it's Ubuntu's obligation to free-up launchpad.

Ubuntu can free it or not. FSF just wants to have a free system, at least at this point, they aren't demanding anybody else do anything. (except remain compliant with the licensing and terms of GPL, of course)

Anyways so far what I've seen from Launchpad.. it is VERY unimpressing. I don't think that gNewSense is going to be missing out on anything.

Launchpad appears to be a website

Posted Nov 5, 2006 21:22 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Fedora doesnt endorse non-free repositories in anyway. There is no formal non-free or contribs repository.

New distribution: gNewSense 1.0

Posted Nov 3, 2006 13:39 UTC (Fri) by mbanck (subscriber, #9035) [Link]

I really can't say because I was in no way involved with this, but from indirect comments from FSF and Canonical people and casual mentionings of seemingly related stuff by Canonical developers, I have the feeling Canonical is fine with this derived distribution and maybe even gave technical advise and help on how to do this.

The FSF has advertised several very exotic GNU/Linux distributions as being "the 100% Free one" in the past, so having something 100% Free (as in FSF) on a solid Debian/Ubuntu base is a nice thing. It does not look likely that they would move away from stable Ubuntu a lot, and it does not make much sense to do so, either.

It is just unfortunate that it took over 100 Debian derived distributions until somebody came up with something liked by the FSF, and then it is only indirectly based on the community leader for Freedom.

Michael