New distribution: gNewSense 1.0

New distribution: gNewSense 1.0

Posted Nov 9, 2006 12:08 UTC (Thu) by samj (subscriber, #7135)
Parent article: New distribution: gNewSense 1.0

I was chatting about gNewSense with [one of] the founder[s], Brian Brazil, after the Irish Linux Users Group (ILUG, http://linux.ie) AGM last Saturday, during which a talk was given on the subject.

I explained to him that I felt that while gNewSense could play an important role in the Linux ecosystem, that role shouldn't be encouraging what I'll call 'Distribution Proliferation', rather the project's aim should be to eradicate itself. They should not be aiming to recruit users (except for development and testing) nor derivatives (which would effectively be derivatives of a derivative of a derivative of Debian) but to supply feedback in the way of patches and bugs to upstream such that eventually their grievances are resolved in Debian and Ubuntu and gNewSense will no longer be required.

One good example of this would be to submit a patch for the kernel which labels non-free firmware with a comment. The patch would likely be accepted and it would make identifying problem areas easier for people working on fixes.

Anyway, why would I want to install an operating system which is likely to break any or all of my graphics, storage and network access? That's assuming even that I care about firmware blobs, particularly if those blobs are configuration rather than code (someone wanting to utilise an i960 processor on a RAID card is conceivable however the value of 'source' for configuration data is questionable, particularly when that information is typically under NDA, based on immutable standards or illegal to change eg in the case of WiFi!). I'd rather punish vendors who burn this stuff into ROMs than those who realise it sometimes needs to be updated.

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