Posted Jun 14, 2008 8:23 UTC (Sat) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750)
In reply to: Changes to Gobuntu by elanthis
Parent article: Changes to Gobuntu
Yes, but since it's hard/impossible to do as good job with Gobuntu anyway as is being done
with gNewSense, it's better to not trying to do "almost similar, but not as good" project.
There weren't really too many people interested in actually doing something specifically for
Gobuntu. Instead it's more beneficial to just try sync with gNewSense in general to any extent
that is reasonably possible, so that the freedom aspects are improved for every Ubuntu flavor.
For most, including me, it's probably quite fine that there's the "Free Software only" option
(currently in boot menu, accessible with F6), together with the alternative option of simply
disabling "restricted" and "multiverse" repositories which ensures reasonably 100% free system
- and it is something that should get better if remaining possibly problematic stuff currently
in main or universe is noticed via gNewSense's work and moved to restricted/multiverse.
I think the Debian / Ubuntu (main/universe) level of freedomness is quite enough, and
gNewSense is just there, just like RMS itself, to remind that nothing is ever 100% complete or
perfect, even though it's beneficial to aim for it always. The small but important
non-DFSG-free GLX pieces are one important example of stuff that has to be, at some point,
fixed / rewritten.
I don't mind few firmwares on the CD media really, I don't feel there's anything particularly
problematic about those if those can be just left there, untouched. In the long run AMD/ATI
and NVIDIA proprietary drivers could probably be even dropped from the CD, as AMD is providing
open drivers in the future for all cards and Nouveau could make 3D work for desktop usage on
NVIDIA, too. People can still easily install the proprietary driver from Internet if
necessary, but in the future those hopefully aren't needed to provide basic 2D/3D acceleration
/ resolutions for any card.
Btw, I think it's still very good if interested people contribute identifying packages in a
wrong section in Ubuntu. In simple cases a bug report, or helping to separate the problematic
pieces to new packages. One example is mplayer which is actually erroneously in multiverse,
even though it's of course free software and from which, in case really needed, the
shown-to-be-real-patent-threats bits can be disabled. It's in Debian main too nowadays, and I
heard it's going to be moved to universe in Ubuntu, as should be.