Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Eric Sandall <eric AT sandall.us>]

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On Wed, 2 Nov 2005, Seth Alan Woolley wrote:
> http://www.gnu.org/links/links.html#FreeGNULinuxDistributions
>
> If you look at the above link, you can see some Totally Free(R)(TM)
> distros.
>
> I wanted to ping the list to see if there's substantial support behind
> meeting their criteria.

I'd love for us to be listed there, but...

> We'd need to do four things:
>
> Change the social contract to eliminate the "we support non-free
> software" section.

While I disagree with changing our Social Contract to fit someone
else's idea of how we should operate, perhaps changing that to "we
support the user's choice of software"? Then we can still provide
z-rejected (yeah, see below) because our users want it while still
matching this requirement (IMO).

> Eliminate the z-rejected grimoire to be hosted/maintained by a separate
> system (no SCM or website mingling, grimoire url to be explicitly added).

Can it be on the same machine, but in a different repository? This
would mean we'd also have to remove z-rejected from
listing.{txt,html}? So far I'm not liking the sound of their
requirements.

> Scan the grimoire for stuff that needs moved to the z-rejected section
> and do that.  (The FSF keeps a list of GPL-compatible and
> non-GPL-compatible-but-free licenses.)

We should do this anyways. :)

> Switch our SCM to something(s) other than perforce for everything.

If we can find an SCM that works (or several SCMs as Stitt points out)
then we can.

> Who thinks this is worth it?  Who thinks it's not worth it?

I would like to be FSF-style free, but we also support the users
choice (e.g. z-rejected style packages (other than binary-only)). I
don't see how, given the above, we can support both without making it
overly difficult for users (e.g. instead of `scribe add z-rejected`
they'd now need to do `scribe add z-rejected from <some URL other than
http://download.sourcemage.org>`).

I assume we'd also have to remove any mention of z-rejected in our
spells (e.g. no more depending on JAVA in z-rejected for, say,
eclipse). We'd have to remove the optional JAVA support from KDE and
ANT support from kdevelop. Any package that needs JAVA (our entire
java section) would have to go into z-rejected, even though some of
them are GPL'd or FSF-free.

That's just for JAVA. There's also firmware drivers, closed-source
drivers (e.g. nvidia_driver), removing all information about
'non-free' spells from our 'free' spells (e.g. CONFLICTS, DEPENDS,
TRIGGERS, etc. could /not/ reference non-free packages, thus breaking
many of them from even working in our system (e.g. exim netqmail)).

Sorry, but it sounds like those requirements are too much for me to
stomach, unless I'm greatly misunderstanding what they want. There's a
reason there are only 5 distributions listed there, and why those 5
are even less popular than we are (I've only heard of one, GNUStep,
and last I heard that's a framework for window managers, not a
distribution. On second look, looks like they just made a LiveCD with
the GNUStep code and some other 'free' packages).

> Seth
>
> P.S.  I favor becoming as Free(R)(TM) as possible.  I will do what the
> group desires, but I think it's something we should consider, at least.

- -sandalle

- --
Eric Sandall                     |  Source Mage GNU/Linux Developer
eric AT sandall.us                  |  http://www.sourcemage.org/
http://eric.sandall.us/          |  SysAdmin @ Inst. Shock Physics @ WSU
http://counter.li.org/  #196285  |  http://www.shock.wsu.edu/
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