Hi Oron! Replying only to discussi...@hamakor where Migo is subscribed.
On Saturday 03 Oct 2009 22:03:26 Oron Peled wrote: > Shlomi, have you noticed you are the only one so far > that consistently cross post to several mailing lists? Yes, I'm sorry about that. I replied to an old email in my inbox after I cleaned it up today, and hit reply-all. I'll try to avoid cross-posting in the future. (I should note that my original post was on-topic on all the mailing lists that I posted it on.) > > On Saturday, 3 בOctober 2009 15:48:53 Shlomi Fish wrote: > > ... the FSF is far too picky and fanatical about its choice of > > what is a "100% Free Distribution". From my understanding, the FSF does > > not even want to have references or mentions of non-free-software > > anywhere, or that there will be repositories of non-FOSS software. This > > seems way too irrational and impractical. > > Yeah, how irrational is the Free Software Foundation to refuse > advertising and soliciting of non-free software... > > Shlomi, you are entitled to your own opinions and License choice. > I (like most FOSS users and advocates) am already used to being called > fanatical, irrational and impractical -- by users of non-free software. > > However, when someone makes these claims on a Linux mailing list they > are obviously trolling -- maybe that's why you keep cross posting > (trying to maximize impact). That's not the reason I cross posted. :-) However, I distinguish between ideology and stubbornness. I try to avoid using non-free software and depending on it, due to a bad experience with a non-FOSS application: http://better-scm.berlios.de/bk/ http://better-scm.berlios.de/docs/shlomif-evolution.html (The links are both offline at the moment due to a berlios.de outage but should be back soon). Nevertheless, I think that while distributors should keep the core distribution free, they should be allowed to keep non-free software packages that they consider important enough in separate "non-free" repositories, without that making them less free. In Debian's case that would include a lot of "non-free" graphics and audio that are considered acceptable even by RMS: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/09/191257 I don't see why allowing people to conveniently install not-entirely-free software that they need (after they were made aware of the implications) will make it less free. It's not as if the distributor encourages using it - it's just part of giving a complete user-experience. Mandriva, Gentoo, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, etc. are complete operating systems, and they should be as comprehensive as possible. So I don't think it makes them less free. Regards, Shlomi Fish (Writing on his Mandriva GNU/Linux Cooker system). -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ What does "Zionism" mean? - http://shlom.in/def-zionism Chuck Norris read the entire English Wikipedia in 24 hours. Twice. _______________________________________________ Discussions mailing list [email protected] http://hamakor.org.il/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discussions
