> I will stop responding to mails trying to attach our OS with our > hardware. This is for FSF Free distro endorsement, and the other is for > RYF hardware - stop combining the two things.
Though an FSF member, I am not a part of the team that makes the determination for FSDG compliance, so my comments are strictly advisory. Also, I am always in the market for freedom-respecting laptops, and I certainly hope I can use your products one day, since they look and sound awesome. I wish you luck in your business venture and I hope you will succeed in fully liberating your hardware, and getting that approved by FSF as well. I certainly think it should be your goal, given your philosophy. With that being said, You are the ones who combined OS and hardware by putting both things on the same website. In fact, the page where you peddle non-free laptops is literally one click away from your OS page, and in the same domain. The FSDG could not be clearer on this point: it will not approve any project that advertises and/or delivers non-free software, and it doesn't matter whether this non-free software is technically a part of the OS, as long as its endorsement comes from the same project. For example, Trisquel could never get approved if they used their domain to suggest installing adobe flash, nevermind whether they distribute it themselves. So far in this conversation you have been offered an extremely easy and clear way to fix this issue, simply by decoupling the OS from your hardware business. For reasons I do not quite understand, you ignored that suggestion completely. If PureOS wants to be even considered for the FSF endorsement, it should at the very least create a separate domain for itself, and remove all endorsement of non-free hard/software from that domain. This is FSDG 101. You can still endorse and recommend PureOS from the non-free hardware side, but not the other way around. Your PureOS front may not willfully lead users to non-free software, how hard is that to understand? Once you have a free laptop, you will be able to advertize that particular product from the PureOS side, but not your whole business, not for as long as you business has any non-free options available for sale. > We are mirroring Debian main archive for that and AFAIK Firefox is > entirely FLOSS, but it allows non-free extensions. It would be a bit > radical to remove it because users can access non-free extensions - we > can use lynx to access websites that promote nonfree things etc etc. I > think many distros used Iceweasel and now will use Firefox if they are > based on Debian - and again, Firefox is Free software AFAIK. Once again, you seem to be ignoring the suggestions designed to get you approved. The stock Firefox fails FSDG, as so does every Mozilla product that leads users to install non-free addons via the addon interface. No one is arguing with you on this, we are simply telling you this issue has been discussed to death already, and the conclusion reached by the FSDG compliance team is what I just said. You stand no chance getting the endorsement while you distribute a browser which suggests non-free addons, period. I am well known around here for criticizing Icecat, so I am not saying that's what you must use to replace Firefox, but you will have to replace it with something, be it Icecat or or your own homebrew, so long as it fixes all the same issues Icecat had to fix in order to become compliant. As an aside, you seem to be conflating free software with FSDG, but they are not the same at all. FSDG is much stronger: it certainly implies that the entire OS in question must be free software, but there is much more on top of that. Some versions of Firefox and Thuderbird, for example, may well be free software, but they also clearly fail FSDG, and so does the PureOS website in its present state. I really hope this has been helpful. Once again, I wish more capable distributions would join the FSDG ranks, and I hope you will see the reason behind our comments and start taking meaningful steps towards making the PureOS project more user-friendly.
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