On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 10:34 PM, Ted Smith wrote: > That post seems more like anti-freedom ranting than something that was > in a spirit of actual help.
I don't know if we read the same article, but the author goes on great length to explain the licensing background of a piece of software that is included in gNewSense. I'd wish he directly contacted the gNewSense community, but not doing so certainly does not make him "anti-freedom". I disagree with him on his general view that freedom oriented derivatives of popular distributions are useless or that the nonfree firmware issue is a religious war (i.e. an argument where both sides are evenly well supported and decisions are ultimately based on personal tastes). However, in the end, his contribution to free software by showing a bug present in most free distros and a possible flaw in Free Software Directory's screening process far outweighs his negative comments. > It isn't even clear if that original license is still valid And this exact lack of clarity by itself disqualifies a program from being included in a GNU/Linux distribution that is committed to defending users' freedom. > If Mr. Callaway thinks we don't have enough auditing, he's welcome to > help, I'm sure. Did he notify any of these distributions when he found > afio, or did he just write a snarky blog post about it? I wouldn't qualify his blog post as a proper bug report but it is certainly a positive action. (And he seems to be active in the Fedora community in fuzzy licensing issues.) I hope he could find time and motivation to help us identify more packages with questionable licensing. Ali Gündüz _______________________________________________ gNewSense-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnewsense-users
