gNewSense makes sense?

gNewSense makes sense?

Posted Feb 2, 2007 19:59 UTC (Fri) by mikov (subscriber, #33179)
In reply to: gNewSense makes sense? by k8to
Parent article: gNewSense makes sense

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 ?

---

(Log in to post comments)