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gNewSense makes sense?gNewSense makes sense?Posted Feb 2, 2007 12:06 UTC (Fri) by k8to (subscriber, #15413)In reply to: gNewSense makes sense? by vonbrand Parent article: gNewSense makes sense
I welcome that these developers have decided to scratch their own itch. At the same time, I do not think their userbase really exists. That is, users who really care about freedom, but yet cannot manage to decline to use the non-free package source in Debian (which is not enabled without your decision to do so).
The choice of gNewSense or the choice of not bothering to turn on non-free are similarly a single choice, so they seem of equal convenience to a free software fan.
I suppose gNewSense might offer "warm fuzzies" of cleanliness to a certain mindset, but this is really a difficult feature to pin down.
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gNewSense makes sense? Posted Feb 2, 2007 19:59 UTC (Fri) by mikov (subscriber, #33179) [Link] I concur. gNewSense seems completely pointless to me - I don't know anybody who would use it instead of Debian. What is worse, it may be artifically dividing the community.
As far as I can tell, the only real difference between Debian and gNewSense is that Debian still has some sourceless firmware in the kernel. That said, my personal opinion is that firmware which doesn't run in the kernel is not part of the kernel and should not be subject to the GPL; similarly the hardware schematic doesn't have to be GPL either. Neither the firmware nor the hardware are derived from the kernel.
Additionally, while I welcome open source firmware and would like to see more of it, one must be aware of the serious practical limitations - for example there are no free Linux tools to compile an FPGA (as far as I know); so what good is open source firmware ?
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