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Ormaaj
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 Posted: Mon Sep 07, 2009 10:57 pm Post subject: The FSF doesn't endorse Gentoo? |
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The FSF website gives a single sentence, citing their reasoning behind not endorsing Gentoo as being:
"Gentoo makes it easy to install a number of nonfree programs through their primary package system." (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/common-distros.html)
The Gentoo philosophy states:
"If the tool forces the user to do things a particular way, then the tool is working against, rather than for, the user. We have all experienced situations where tools seem to be imposing their respective wills on us. This is backwards, and contrary to the Gentoo philosophy."
Which is fundamentally in line with the philosophy and tradition of Unix, Gnu, and free software. Gentoo respects my freedom and intelligence by giving me the choice to use it in absolutely any way, even on other platforms like BSD.
Being a meta-distribution, and due to the unique nature of portage, it would be nonsensical to intentionally cripple it by making it difficult to install any kind of software, including proprietary software. Since Portage is a scripting system for automating the building of software, it must be agnostic as to the kinds of software it builds.
I think it is wrong to judge a distribution in terms of the ease with which proprietary software could in principle be installed. If users want their systems to be free of proprietary software, then that is their choice, and the distro should make it easy to do that, which AFAIK, Gentoo does.
I'm even a student member of the FSF, but I think their distro policies here violate their own principles.
Last edited by Ormaaj on Tue Sep 08, 2009 5:18 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Naib
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| Posted: Mon Sep 07, 2009 11:13 pm Post subject: |
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so in trying to promote freedom they advocate denying it
my head hurts
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Ormaaj
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| Posted: Mon Sep 07, 2009 11:16 pm Post subject: |
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| Naib wrote: | so in trying to promote freedom they advocate denying it
my head hurts |
Thats what it sounds like. |
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Kollin
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| Posted: Mon Sep 07, 2009 11:16 pm Post subject: |
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politics...
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AaronPPC
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| Posted: Tue Sep 08, 2009 5:03 am Post subject: |
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Worse...extreme ideology.
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djdunn
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| Posted: Tue Sep 08, 2009 5:31 am Post subject: |
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write them an email and tell them that then.
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AllenJB
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| Posted: Tue Sep 08, 2009 6:26 am Post subject: |
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| The FSF are a bunch of hippies. Like Debian, the best thing to do is ignore them. |
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Sven Vermeulen
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| Posted: Tue Sep 08, 2009 6:51 am Post subject: |
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There are users that want to abide to the FSF "policy". To accomodate these users, Gentoo introduced an enhancement proposal (Handling of ACCEPT_LICENSE) where users can tell what licenses they accept (or license-groups, in which case they can select all FSF-approved licenses) and which they can't (well, won't).
I think this even puts more freedom to the users.
However, afaik, ACCEPT_LICENSE has not been introduced in Portage yet.
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AaronPPC
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| Posted: Tue Sep 08, 2009 7:33 am Post subject: |
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| djdunn wrote: | | write them an email and tell them that then. |
To borrow a phrase from someone else, it would be like arguing with my dining room table.
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V-Li
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| Posted: Tue Sep 08, 2009 1:20 pm Post subject: |
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| They do stick to their rules. You have the freedom to use Windows and you will still tell the FSF that they are morons because their definition sucks? |
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Quick23t
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| Posted: Tue Sep 08, 2009 2:30 pm Post subject: |
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| AaronPPC wrote: | | djdunn wrote: | | write them an email and tell them that then. |
To borrow a phrase from someone else, it would be like arguing with my dining room table. |
You can't apply human freedom to software freedom, two entirely different subject matters. |
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energyman76b
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| Posted: Wed Sep 09, 2009 8:41 am Post subject: |
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FSF wants you to follow their definition of freedom. By force if necessary. They hate true freedom of choice because that might lead to free people freely choosing not-fsf-approved-software. Freedom of choice is their worst nightmare.
They know what is good for you, so not being in line with their wishes makes you stupid - or evil.
In the end they want to dominate you just like everybody else.
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V-Li
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| Posted: Wed Sep 09, 2009 8:51 am Post subject: |
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You are polemic. The FSF gives you freedom of choice as long as you don't want to provide less freedom to others. That's the viral component of the GPL and what made free software so successful. Even if you consider the BSD license more free, it did not lead to the development we see today.
Being able to hack away on Linksys routers or have the source code available for a lot of devices has been caused by the GPL/FSF not hindered. |
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sera
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| Posted: Wed Sep 09, 2009 11:24 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | They reject non-free applications, non-free programming platforms, non-free drivers, or non-free firmware “blobs”. If by mistake they do include any, they remove it. |
The phrase why gentoo is not on this list sounds blunt but it's clear gentoo doesn't fit on that list. |
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Ormaaj
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| Posted: Wed Sep 09, 2009 11:46 am Post subject: |
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| V-Li wrote: | You are polemic. The FSF gives you freedom of choice as long as you don't want to provide less freedom to others. That's the viral component of the GPL and what made free software so successful. Even if you consider the BSD license more free, it did not lead to the development we see today.
Being able to hack away on Linksys routers or have the source code available for a lot of devices has been caused by the GPL/FSF not hindered. |
I completely agree with this point. It is especially important in that it forces hardware manufacturers/vendors to give us what we need.
However, this is something entirely different. Rather than implementing licensing measures intended to preserve freedom, they want us to implement technical measures which restrict the kinds of things the software can do, or at least make it more difficult. Those are two very different things. This imposes restrictions upon how the end-user can use their software. That is in addition to restricting the ways in which a user or developer can modify and re-distribute software, which is what the GPL already does. |
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d2_racing
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| Posted: Wed Sep 09, 2009 11:59 am Post subject: |
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Look at the list, they endorse which distro ?
All the popular ones are rejected.
LFS ???? |
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Naib
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| Posted: Wed Sep 09, 2009 12:03 pm Post subject: |
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well in all fairness they are welcome to their philosophy. I don't agree with it and probably never will - there is far too much great closed-source application which FOSS have never come close to riveling (take Matlab:Simulink the nearest closed-source competitor is rubbish let alone the FOSS equiv which is a complete joke)
As long as FSF doesn't force themselves on me I don't really care. The moment Gentoo forces it on me I am leaving gentoo. The moment the final linux distro forces it on me I am leaving linux
simple as that. They can try and take the superiour moral high ground (and yes the GPL and all has done a fantastic job as has already been stated) but the closed-source model works as well, and for specialist software it really is the only option
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energyman76b
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| Posted: Wed Sep 09, 2009 12:06 pm Post subject: |
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| V-Li wrote: | You are polemic. The FSF gives you freedom of choice as long as you don't want to provide less freedom to others. That's the viral component of the GPL and what made free software so successful. Even if you consider the BSD license more free, it did not lead to the development we see today.
Being able to hack away on Linksys routers or have the source code available for a lot of devices has been caused by the GPL/FSF not hindered. |
polemic? it is them attacking distros that make it possible or even easy to install software the FSF does not like.
So the FSF wants to restrict user freedom.
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tcoffeep
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| Posted: Wed Sep 09, 2009 12:23 pm Post subject: |
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| lol. ironic. |
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d2_racing
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| Posted: Wed Sep 09, 2009 12:47 pm Post subject: |
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Yeah  |
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Ant P.
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| Posted: Wed Sep 09, 2009 9:25 pm Post subject: |
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| Sven Vermeulen wrote: | | However, afaik, ACCEPT_LICENSE has not been introduced in Portage yet. |
I seem to remember it working (or at least, it worked for the ut2004 clickthrough EULA when I was reinstalling a long time ago).
Paludis does have a licenses.conf that does the same thing (but finer-grained, like package.use). I tried using that as a whitelist for a while, but it's insanely high-maintenance if you do it that way... X.org seems to have a billion license files alone even though they're mostly identical. |
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platojones
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| Posted: Wed Sep 09, 2009 9:39 pm Post subject: |
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| That reads like a Stallman rant. |
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Ormaaj
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| Posted: Thu Sep 10, 2009 2:45 am Post subject: |
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| sera wrote: | | Quote: | | They reject non-free applications, non-free programming platforms, non-free drivers, or non-free firmware “blobs”. If by mistake they do include any, they remove it. |
The phrase why gentoo is not on this list sounds blunt but it's clear gentoo doesn't fit on that list. |
What would that mean for Gentoo? Do the stages have anything like that in them?
Ubuntu for instance segregates everything non-free into separate repos, and that still isn't good enough for the FSF. If that's the case then even the ACCEPT_LICENSE measure wouldn't be enough. For Gentoo to comply to the satisfaction of the FSF we would probably have to go to insane measures and remove all of the ebuilds which install nonfree software from the tree. Even then it would do nothing because they would just be available in some overlay anyways... except less secure since they wouldn't be officially supported.
| Quote: | | That reads like a Stallman rant. |
Lol! That was somewhat intentional. I can achieve that trademark Stallman douchebag effect if I want to.
| Quote: | Look at the list, they endorse which distro ?
All the popular ones are rejected.
LFS ???? |
Who actually uses gNewSense for serious work? Thats the only distro on that list that I've even heard of. |
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energyman76b
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| Posted: Thu Sep 10, 2009 8:09 am Post subject: |
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>They do not have a policy of only including free software, and removing nonfree software if it is discovered.
and if you make it possible for users to install 'non free' software, you fail in their eyes.
AKA they hate user freedom.
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sera
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| Posted: Thu Sep 10, 2009 9:48 am Post subject: |
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| Ormaaj wrote: | | What would that mean for Gentoo? Do the stages have anything like that in them? |
But a emerge -e system after installing a fresh stage3 can pull in suns jvm for instance.
| Quote: | | Ubuntu for instance segregates everything non-free into separate repos, and that still isn't good enough for the FSF. If that's the case then even the ACCEPT_LICENSE measure wouldn't be enough. For Gentoo to comply to the satisfaction of the FSF we would probably have to go to insane measures and remove all of the ebuilds which install nonfree software from the tree. Even then it would do nothing because they would just be available in some overlay anyways... except less secure since they wouldn't be officially supported. |
Right, still if the ACCEPT_LICENSE was triggered by the FSF and this list, gentoo already gained a lot by not being on that list. It opens a new dimension in distro management.
| Quote: | Look at the list, they endorse which distro ?
All the popular ones are rejected. |
Why are you so eager to see gentoo on that list? |
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