Debian GNU/Linux [LWN.net]

The Debian Weekly News for August 19, 2003 is out. This week covers a review of LibraNet, GNU/LinEx distribution more free than Debian?, discussions on debian-legal on the definition of "software", new rescue CDs, and much more.

August 16, 2003 was the tenth anniversary of the first release of the Debian distribution. Debian has come a long way; congratulations are due to the many hundreds of developers who have worked at making it better over the years.

In commemoration of the event, "zwazo" has created 10 Years!, a wallpaper made with The GIMP for the 10 year anniversary of the Debian project with text from Ian Murdock's original announcement.

In this lengthy Bits from the RM, Debian Release Manager Anthony Towns examines the possibility of a stable release (of Sarge) before the end of the year. To get there, the experimental branch needs to be more widely used. Also outlined is a new policy for NMUs.

DebianPlanet covers a Netcraft article which says, "Debian is the second most popular Linux distribution we find on internet web sites, surpassed only by Red Hat, and leaving the likes of SuSE and Mandrake in its wake."

Manoj Srivastava, Debian Project Secretary, has re-opened some pending issues. The issues are: Constitutional amendment: disambiguation of 4.1.5 and Constitutional amendment: alternate disambiguation of 4.1.5.

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Is RMS biased against Debian?

Posted Aug 21, 2003 13:15 UTC (Thu) by angdraug (subscriber, #7487) [Link]

As it was noticed on the debian-devel mailing list, it only takes one look here to immediately notice that LinEx ships Acrobat, J2RE, NVidia-GLX, and Flash plugin, all of which are completely non-free.

Thus, Richard's recommendation against Debian in favor of LinEx appears more as a result of the disagreement between FSF and Debian on DFSG (in)compliance of the GNU FDL, rather than a result of a well-considered choice. It is unfortunate that he chose to misjudge Debian at the same time as, according to Debian Release Manager, other people from FSF are working on a new DFSG-free version of FDL.

Is RMS biased against Debian?

Posted Aug 21, 2003 17:00 UTC (Thu) by jdthood (guest, #4157) [Link]

> Richard's recommendation against Debian in favor of LinEx appears
> more as a result of the disagreement between FSF and Debian on
> DFSG (in)compliance of the GNU FDL

You are accusing RMS of behaving pettily. Do you have any
evidence to back up your interpretation of his behavior?

Is RMS biased against Debian?

Posted Aug 22, 2003 9:05 UTC (Fri) by angdraug (subscriber, #7487) [Link]

I never met RMS in person so I can't say whether he has a habit to behave pettily or not. Hence question mark in the subject of my message: given how obvious is the evidence that LinEx ships non-free software, it has to be either that Richard didn't do due research before making such claims, or that he overlooked this matter deliberately.

RMS is widely known for paying a lot of attention to details, especially when it comes to software freedom, that is why second options seems more likely to me.

And no, I don't feel good about finding inconsistency in his claims: I believe that RMS is an essential part of our community, and I see this issue as a bug that I want to be fixed ;-)