There's now no 3D support in gNewSense!

Posted May 3, 2008 15:50 UTC (Sat) by sbergman27 (guest, #10767)
In reply to: There's now no 3D support in gNewSense! by tetromino
Parent article: Get DeltaH, gNewSense 2.0

It is actually of little consequence, since gNewSense is mostly irrelevant except to those few
people who use it and would heartily agree with the evil code being removed.

Linux is open enough that pretty much any group should be able to find a distro with which
they are comfortable.  Which is nice.  It helps keep the extremists off the more popular
distros' mailing lists.

There's now no 3D support in gNewSense!

Posted May 3, 2008 18:59 UTC (Sat) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link] (1 responses)

Dunno about extremists, Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/openSUSE/all want to have non-free stuff
separated at least, and preferably not part of the distribution itself, and if what gNewSense
has done is entirely making sense then there's some stuff to ponder for all distros.

There are a few thing to consider, namely that the files are hugely important and if the
GLX/SGI licenses are actually very strictly non-free or more like annoyingly non-free-like but
not necessarily absolutely non-free. Also how much an effort would be needed for relicensing
if necessary.

The fact that gNewSense has guts to take an important part away which they have doubts about
does not make them extremists in my opinion, just people who keep up the good work on
investigating this stuff. Without DFSG, FSF definitions etc. we all would be in a swamp of
uncertainty, even though the random Joe User does not care that much as long as it works.

There's now no 3D support in gNewSense!

Posted May 5, 2008 15:24 UTC (Mon) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

In this case it's something that is worth noting, maybe even requesting a licensing change,
but I doubt it's worth actually worrying about or removing major pieces of functionality.