On 13.07.2026 ÖÖ 10:06, Andrej Shadura wrote:
Hello,On Thu, 9 Jul 2026, at 17:43, Hakan Bayındır wrote:Let me put another forward-looking statement: Big Linux vendors might stop sharing source packages for their versions of uutils, and may even bake in DRM and/or “user-watching analytics” features into them to TiVoize their distributions, effectively making them non-free. This possibility bothers me. While I have nothing about the author(s) of uutils (I don’t know them to begin with), the possibility of this bothers me a lot. Do we want Debian to be one of these vendors, enabling this possibility? Where does it place Debian in relation to its motto, “The Universal Operating System”? Am I (or others putting this possibility forward) blowing this out of proportion, too?I think so. Vendors who wanted to ship non-GPL or not completely free userland already do so (see toybox, old GPL-2 coreutils, custom userland tools etc.) These days it’s not coreutils that matter, but what’s on top of them. And there, unfortunately, Android and the likes have won, with ecosystem nothing like Linux distributions we know and use.
I respect your point of view, yet I'll kindly disagree. In short, I believe we shouldn't let things go because there are other, also popular, alternatives.
Also, I believe it's a slippery slope to say that "X doesn't matter, but Y". This view simply brings us to Windows and macOS. Then, we can argue that their non-free foundations don't matter either, as long as we use Free Software at the top layer however, we know that this is not the case.
So, keeping all levels Free (not only Open) is a worthy goal in my eyes. Even if there are other popular alternatives.
There'll be always different breeds, mixes and opinions on how to compose an operating system. Existence of alternatives doesn't mean that we should abandon what we have and like.
With Respect and Warm regards, Hakan
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