Public SourceMage Discussion List

[Seth Alan Woolley <seth AT positivism.org>]

The list isn't as important as the benefits of actually being free.  
Being surrounded by vendors who want to create lock-in at work, I don't 
want to participate in it in a non-paid environment.  I can't even come 
close to assuring quality, not so much in a "I'm sure of this", but if 
something comes up, I can't fix it myself.  I don't have any money for 
it, so I can't _pay_ a vendor to fix their product to work with 
sourcemage (which is the normal way to fix a problem in a piece of 
proprietary software you don't actually have access to).  We're 
officially supporting non-free packages according to the social 
contract, so I don't have deniability if a problem in non-free software 
crops up from a QA perspective.

If we're not supporting non-free packages, I want it explicit.  If we 
are, I want it explicit as to how much.  Right now, we support it so 
long as it's not a dependency of the core (which has been argued that it 
has been through perforce).  If I can build a support matrix for 
packages that doesn't include any non-free packages, I'd feel better, 
...

(The following is a separate and higher level argument from the one 
above.)

...but I also don't want GNUdists to be able to say I'm supporting 
non-free software by association with a group.  The easy way around this 
is to not associate the non-free to our group.

Why is that association important for the free software movement?  
Because if every group that worked on free software also supported 
non-free software, it works against the principle of free software as an 
ethical solution to the problem of proprietary software.  Non-free 
software is getting free support from us.

Yes, I've heard the arguments that software is an ecosystem of free and 
non-free, but that fails to the naturalistic fallacy.  Just because we 
live in a world with a certain patterns doesn't mean we are obligated to 
behave in past patterns of behavior.

On Fri, Nov 04, 2005 at 01:09:14PM +0100, Pieter Lenaerts wrote:
> quality, use, performance or necessity of packages A or B matters not in
> this discussion.

Ultimately, you are correct.  Nobody is forced to use a certain piece of 
software in 99% of circumstances.  Cheap bastards that want to socialize 
costs and privatize profit with a barter of vendor-lock-in and the 
business risk of using non-free software, yes, they will say it is 
required, as our social contract does, but this is a case where our 
social contract is flat out empirically ignorant.  Those who use 
non-free software do at peril to those who desire to control their own 
computing destiny and take it out of the hands of large corporations.

> 
> what we want to decide is this:
> do we remove non-free software from our official grimoires and server or
> not?
> 
> if we don't: no chance to get on the list
> if we do: I'm sure some people will publish and maintain a z-rejected
> grimoire. We would have a lot of work to get the dependencies out of our
> grimoires, but nothing's impossible

Actually, it wouldn't be that much, I already took a look at most of the 
licenses.

> 
> let's just stop claiming that gnumeric and abiword could replace OOo,

I installed both at a client.  They preferred gnumeric over OOo.  
Abiword/OOo is probably another story when you get into fancy 
styles/tables.

> that java/flash are not necessary and nvidia owners are to be pitied. it
> has nothing to do with the discussion what person A thinks of package B.

It does have everything to do with the discussion of what person A 
thinks of package B, it doesn't have much to do with the ethics and 
philosophy of free software, though, although the standard argument 
against going all-free is that there's tons of non-free software that we 
absolutely need, while irrelevent, some people still believe in its 
truth.  To counter its truth I can assume its validity and attack its 
soundness.  I already don't believe in its validity, but those who 
disagree sometimes take it for granted.

Seth

> 
> Op vr, 04-11-2005 te 01:02 -0800, schreef Seth Alan Woolley:
> > On Thu, Nov 03, 2005 at 12:44:56PM -0500, Paul Mahon wrote:
> > > I can't see why we would care about being on that list one way the
> > > other. The truth is, is that there are packages out there for which
> > > there are no decent (GNU)free alternatives exist, Java is an example.
> > 
> > You can't be serious.  Java coding is a choice one can make if they want 
> > to write in a poorly-designed and monopoly-controlled language.
> > 
> > Just because we could build a java replacement doesn't mean we should.
> > 
> > > Just moving the grimoire to another host would still violate the
> > > "spirit" of the list, we would still be maintaining it, and thus
> > > advocate its use. 
> > 
> > Not if it's not officially supported by us and supported only be a 
> > separate (possibly overlapping) group of developers that want to waste 
> > their time helping The Man(SM).
> > 
> > > 
> > > It looks like a bunch of changes which will make things more difficult
> > > for new users, and we don't get anything for it except our name on some
> > > wall no one much looks at.
> > 
> > We get the ethical and philosophical benefits that aren't being counted 
> > because perhaps it's not very tangible.
> > 
> > Do we really want marketshare over a truly free and good product?  
> > Personally I don't think the cathedral and the bazaar is perfectly 
> > adequate at describing the process of free software developement.
> > 
> > It's, in fact, unfortunate that people like to follow ESR's lead.  Look 
> > at what he's written, I think his experiment was a bust.
> > 
> > Seth
> > 
> > > 
> > > I'm just not seeing the gain for us.
> > > 
> > > On Wed, 2005-02-11 at 22:02 -0800, 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.
> > > > 
> > > > We'd need to do four things:
> > > > 
> > > > Change the social contract to eliminate the "we support non-free 
> > > > software" section.
> > > > 
> > > > Eliminate the z-rejected grimoire to be hosted/maintained by a 
> > > > separate 
> > > > system (no SCM or website mingling, grimoire url to be explicitly 
> > > > added).
> > > > 
> > > > 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.)
> > > > 
> > > > Switch our SCM to something(s) other than perforce for everything.
> > > > 
> > > > Who thinks this is worth it?  Who thinks it's not worth it?
> > > > 
> > > > 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.
> > > > 
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> > > 
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> > > 
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-- 
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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