On Mon, May 16, 2016 at 10:09 PM, John R. Sowden <jsow...@americansentry.net> wrote: > I understand your comments re: certain type of Ubuntu software. Ubuntu is > also worried about providing restricted software and its legal problems for > a deep pocket. My comment is in regards to the bandwidth consumption re: > different tweaks of the license. Just keep the squeaky clean stuff in the > main install program, and reference the rest in a separate .zip with the > appropriate caveats.
Ubuntu has the right to offer it, or wouldn't proceed. But the Linux community has strong feelings about the issue, and there are those who will vociferously object to including anything that you can't get source for. Canonical, Ubuntu's parent, handles the issue by carefully separating free and non-free, and making non-free an option the user can choose to accept. The default is free software only. For that matter, Ubuntu's default GUI is Unity, an attempt at a "one-size-fits-all" interface that scales from a small screen device like a tablet to a big monitor. Ubuntu is the closest thing to a standard Linux distro these days, because Canonical has taken pains to produce a distro that figures out what it's being installed on, sets itself up, and Just Works with minimal involvement from the user. (That's why I installed it. I've worked with other distros where things like video and networking were pains to configure. With Ubuntu, I didn't have to. I could spend my time using it, not fiddling to *make* it usable.) One of the things on the default Unity desktop was a link to Amazon. People screamed bloody murder about it being there. (It's trivial to remove.) Gee, folks. If you want Linux to be an acceptable choice for a home machine, it needs to be able to do things home users are likely to do, and one of those things will be shop at Amazon. But the more fanatical and self-righteous members of the community don't seem to grasp that. With something like Ubuntu, bandwidth isn't a great concern. The implicit assumption is that folks running it have broadband. For something like FreeDOS, it might be. My default for a FreeDOS distro might be "binaries only". Most folks don't need and couldn't use the source, so why make it part of the package? It *should* be available from the same place you get the base distro, and you can get it if you need it, but there's no requirement to provide it as part of the base distro. The question came up a while back on another open source list, as "Do I have to provide source for my open source offering with my binaries?" The stuff in question was all GPLed code. My response was, "No, you don't. Most folks don't need and can't use the source. They just want the binaries and docs. But the essence of the GPL is that you will *provide* the source if requested, in a form convenient for the user, and you must *tell* the user you will do so and provide the source on request." (It must also be the source you used to create the binaries. The intent is that the user can reproduce your build environment, get your source, and produce a duplicate of what you provided. So you can't just point them at your repository, because you've likely made changes since you issued your binaries, and what the user will get if they pull from the repository won't be the same code you built from. Either package it separately for distribution, or provide links to your repository for the specific revision level you used in building you code.) > John ______ Dennis ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mobile security can be enabling, not merely restricting. Employees who bring their own devices (BYOD) to work are irked by the imposition of MDM restrictions. Mobile Device Manager Plus allows you to control only the apps on BYO-devices by containerizing them, leaving personal data untouched! https://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/304595813;131938128;j _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
