LWN: Comments on "Get DeltaH, gNewSense 2.0"

There's now no 3D support in gNewSense!

roelofs — Sat, 10 May 2008 03:46:30 +0000

According to http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnewsense-users/2008-04..., the problematic files are:
GL/glx/glxext.c hw/dmx/glxProxy/glxext.c

But it's not only that, since also SGI Free Software Licence B is not a free software license, and covers basically all of GLX in X. So option a) mentioned would have been not feasible for gNewSense developers.

But according to the corresponding bugs, X.org fixed it back in January. So why did gNewSense not pick up the fix (whatever it was)? (The bug referenced a checkin number, but there was no patch attached, as far as I could tell, so I have no idea what the X devs think they did to fix it.)

Greg

There's now no 3D support in gNewSense!

drag — Mon, 05 May 2008 15:24:08 +0000

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.

There's now no 3D support in gNewSense!

felixrabe — Sat, 03 May 2008 18:59:05 +0000

I dared to guess because just recently I stumbled upon code that had no license attached
anywhere (cairo-demo (in cvs, not git), xcb-something) and contacted upstream immediately (not
yet for xcb, but I will when I get to it again) because it's just natural for me to do that.

There's now no 3D support in gNewSense!

tajyrink — Sat, 03 May 2008 18:59:01 +0000

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!

felixrabe — Sat, 03 May 2008 18:56:13 +0000

I dare to guess that the gNewSense developers are doing both #2 (long-term approach) and #3
(short-term "we have to make a free software release *now*" approach) in parallel as that
would make the most ... sense :)  #1 is not the job of a distro IM(H)O (though individual
developers that happen to also work on the distro are free to do #1 outside of the distro
realm of course).

Pun?

dark — Sat, 03 May 2008 17:58:03 +0000

I'm guessing: they based it on Ubuntu's Hardy release, abbreviated 'H'. In mathematical notation, a 'delta' is often an offset or difference from some other quantity. For example, Δt would be elapsed time. And since developing gNewSense mainly consists of defining the difference (delta) between it and the corresponding Ubuntu release, they called it the Hardy delta, or delta H.

Pun?

bluss — Sat, 03 May 2008 17:48:53 +0000

What about the name 'DeltaH'? What does that refer to?

There's now no 3D support in gNewSense!

sbergman27 — Sat, 03 May 2008 15:50:56 +0000

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.

Pun?

tajyrink — Sat, 03 May 2008 07:37:22 +0000

Yep, it's intentional. Richard Stallman is often playfully referred to as the Chief GNUisance
(or actually, he himself uses that).

There's now no 3D support in gNewSense!

tajyrink — Sat, 03 May 2008 07:29:31 +0000

According to http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnewsense-users/2008-04..., the
problematic files are:

GL/glx/glxext.c
hw/dmx/glxProxy/glxext.c

But it's not only that, since also SGI Free Software Licence B is not a free software license,
and covers basically all of GLX in X. So option a) mentioned would have been not feasible for
gNewSense developers.

Interestingly, there has been a bug about the non-freeness of the license in Debian since
2003: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=211765 , but still Debian has been
shipping non-free stuff. It has been only recently found (?) that the bug is still there with
X.org.

Pun?

ncm — Sat, 03 May 2008 07:09:37 +0000

Is the name a deliberate pun on "nuisance", or did they invent the name and promote it before
anyone responsible noticed?  I can't see how such a deliberate pun would benefit anyone
actually involved.  GNU hackers are no strangers to wordplay, so accident seems implausible.
Perhaps it is a wry acknowledgment of how the GNU organization is perceived within the larger
community?

There's now no 3D support in gNewSense!

proski — Sat, 03 May 2008 01:42:38 +0000

I agree, informing the original developers would be great (in addition to the immediate upstream distro). I remember that their older version removed the driver for Atmel USB wireless devices. Nobody wrote to the driver developers. I was on the list for that driver at that time, but I learned about it from LWN.

There's now no 3D support in gNewSense!

tetromino — Sat, 03 May 2008 00:36:29 +0000

You've got to love these people.

Suppose you are distro and find some questionably-licensed piece of code in a free software
project. It looks like no-one besides you knows about this licensing problem. What are your
choices of action?
1. reimplement/replace with a free alternative;
2. tell the upstream developers about the licensing problem so they can sort it out; or
3. rip out the code, disabling major features, without informing upstream or giving anyone a
chance to fix the problem.

Naturally, gnuisance picked #3:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnewsense-users/2008-04...

There's now no 3D support in gNewSense!

dwalters — Fri, 02 May 2008 22:32:49 +0000

As far as I can tell, GLX and Mesa have been torn right out of this release (obviously because
they contained nonfree code, which I didn't realise), so now just about every 3D program won't
run at all on gNewSense 2.0!

I can totally understand the reason for doing this, and I have complete respect for the
gNewSense developers for sticking doggedly to their free software-only principles, but I have
to say I'm shocked that there isn't at least a free-software implementation of 3D/OpenGL
stuff. I must admit, I thought Mesa was just that - a FLOSS implementation, which in the
absence of a hardware-accelerated 3D driver, would at least support the basic 3D functionality
required to run, say, Tux Racer.