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sm-discuss - Re: [SM-Discuss] SMGL as GNU-certified Free(R)(TM) Distro?

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  • From: Seth Alan Woolley <seth AT positivism.org>
  • To: Ladislav Hagara <ladislav.hagara AT unob.cz>
  • Cc: sm-discuss AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [SM-Discuss] SMGL as GNU-certified Free(R)(TM) Distro?
  • Date: Fri, 4 Nov 2005 00:47:47 -0800

On Thu, Nov 03, 2005 at 12:05:07PM +0100, Ladislav Hagara wrote:
> > Who thinks this is worth it? Who thinks it's not worth it?
>
>
> I prefer Source Mage GNU/Linux to be as free as possible but until there
> are real free equivalents of well-know non-free software I wouldn't
> prevent us/our users from using it. It should depends only on us/our
> users if we/they want to use non-free software. If we/they use it we
> should support it.

Why? If somebody installed oracle, I couldn't support them. I can only
support code I can see. I'm tired of supporting code I can't see or
modify. Source Mage is my enclave of non-proprietary and an idealistic
vision of how things should operate. If it deviates, I attempt to coax
it in the correct direction.

>
> There are 130 registered boxes on http://ledger.sourcemage.org and:
> z-rejected grimoire is used on 109 boxes

Most of whom are developers who have to have z-rejected installed to
support it, according to our social contract. You need z-rejected just
to install perforce.

> http://ledger.sourcemage.org/users/grimoire.php nvidia_driver is
> installed on 43 of them,

Having crappy hardware is no reason to force me to support nvidia card owners.

> flash is installed even on 61,

I pity these people -- macromedia hasn't even bothered releasing
anything for x86_64. Macromedia is now owned by Apple, who we all know
is famous for their love for free software.

> msttf on 25, j2sdk-bin on 26 boxes.

A small minority. Probably for working with openoffice to open word
documents made with microsoft fonts.

Why can't they run one command to add the z-rejected grimoire to get
these things? They already have to. Why do we have to support
openoffice, a particular embarassment to the free software community.

Gnumeric annihilates openoffice's spreadsheet program. Abiword is
nearing the capabilities of openoffice (but I never liked wysiwyg
editors). Why does our vision have to be compatible with Microsoft's
vision?

To be sure, openoffice is LGPL, but if we can't get it to be reliably
built without j2sdk, we need to keep it out of our support matrix.

> We use non-free software so we should support it.

I try not to. I have to use perforce, of course, but perforce was a
small exception since the program didn't ship requiring it, and cvs was
treated as a second-class citizen until it was dropped (for a valid
reason).

I support each development team's finding their own free SCM if the
featuresets don't align the best for one monolithic SCM.

Seth

--
Seth Alan Woolley [seth at positivism.org], SPAM/UCE is unauthorized
Quality Assurance Team Leader & Security Team: Source Mage GNU/linux
Linux so advanced, it may as well be magic http://www.sourcemage.org
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