Is RMS biased against Debian? [LWN.net]

Is RMS biased against Debian?

Posted Aug 21, 2003 13:15 UTC (Thu) by angdraug (subscriber, #7487)
Parent article: Debian GNU/Linux

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.

(Log in to post comments)

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 ;-)