On 2014-11-21 at 10:08, Ludovic Courtès wrote: > FWIW, the distro built by the GNU Guix project has been making steady > progress. It’s surely far from being a “drop-in replacement” for > Trisquel or other established distros yet, but I think it’s becoming > quite good for hacker-style use cases, although it needs more testing.
I think that with its Gentoo-like configuration power, with reproducible builds, and P2P, it could become the best existing package manager/distribution supporting all users cases. Gentoo has the inconvenience to use Python, have a complex (I find rebuilding everything with LFS simpler you know) and incoherent package managing system and needing recompiling *everytimes* (even when thousand of users recompile the same thing on the same system to get almost the same binary). > Continuing with the same rate, we may well have 0.9 in 4 months and 1.0 > in 8 months. Wow, that’s really encouraging. As much as the really quick development of GNUnet or free neutral associative ISPs. > That leaves a bit of time to resolve the naming issue. In the meantime, > I hope the project can gain more support from interested GNU hackers! On 2014-11-21 at 09:28, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote: > The priority of the GNU project has always been to free users, not to > develop the GNU system. Since we have a free system, our priorities > are to work on furthering the goal of freedom for all computer users. The GNU system is aimed to free users. And in my humble opinion it could better than other systems (the only really democratically developped, development-diffused and upstream distro today is Debian, and —as Mozilla Firefox— it’s not always making the best choices: see GNOME3, systemd…). > Right now one of the biggest struggles in front of us is non-free > Javascript, see https://fsf.org/campaigns/freejs and how companies are > trying to cripple computers for everyone with "Restricted Boot", see > http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/campaigns/secure-boot-vs-restricted-boot. > > Putting explicit effort on release "the" GNU system would not help any > of those goals, hence why work and thought on the GNU system is not a > current priority. Maybe when all software users are free from the > shackles of software hoarders we can finish this, but until that day > there are more pressing issues. Yes it could, and even better. For administrative/political/whatever reasons, W3C’s not going to make the web freeer, Firefox neither, and HP, Dell, etc. are not going to make computers freeers alone. We need a direct action against these. Currently the only problem I see in the GNU project to fight against that is centralization around rms, but beside that, all GNU hackers are really doing a fantastic job. I never saw a such amount of creativity, effort, work and freedom-friendly as concentrated in any other organization I saw (meaning it’s rare, not it’s only GNU’s particularity). But see secure boot problem : we have some non-free distributions authorized… and others… not. We see that because people don’t use enough free software. And when they do, it’s for “open source” and practical needs. We need to recall the importance and potential of freedom in computing. Today is one of the most important moment in struggle for freedom of all humankind history. We see crisis all around the world: technical, ecological, economical, political (yet some days ago, France *again* authorized unregulated censorship of the Internet without passing by the judiciary power, only by police decision, if it’s “terrorism”, large word defined by law as “strong trouble to order”, “order” not being defined otherwise than growing authoritarian thought of course)… And yet free software continue growing, yet free software continue to have a growing importance in struggles around the world, especially when we realize there’s only *one* thing really relevant in humankind evolution: culture. knowledge. science. education. communication. Human beings have the particularity to be purely social animals. They’re entirely socially constructed. And what’s a society? A sum of not all individual, but all *social interactions*, of communications. Today we have maybe the third greatest and most important invention of humanity after written communication and printed communication: computer. And Free Software is at the core of that. As said Benjamin Bayart, a famous free software/neutral internet activist: “printer teached the people to read, Internet will teach it to write” and “Internet and free software are two sides of the same object”. So in the future Free Software will have a growing importance, and we’ll need to face it. We’ll need more free systems. Not only more free software, but more free hardware and more free networks, and to make all of that more trustable (no more heartblead, corruption, or IETF/NIST jokes). Work is being made on that, but we need to have the capacity of following it. And here comes my opinion: Guix with its functional system managing could allow a distributed approach of system development. Not only we could avoid crap decisions as “force GNOME3 on all desktops” (knowing that GNOME3 already encouraged a pure SaaSS vision of desktop, and continue to promote “open-source” philosophy), but we could spread things such as GNUnet, at the core of all this process of liberation. Here comes javascript problem: the real problem isn’t “people not making javascript free”, the real problem is the user can’t control that easily without boycotting a really relevant part of the web and abandoning important features of it. Most useful features of web implies a delegation of responsibility to servers, a centralized vision of networking or the running of non-free javascript. I mean, not only javascript under non-free licenses. I mean obfuscated javascript, complexified JavaScript, changing-on-load JavaScript. JavaScript are just programs made to be re-downloaded each time you run them, and trusted invariably. It’s not enough putting a big filter on it. Of course it’s necessary and it’s better than nothing. But to solve the *real* problem we need to understand the Web is intrinsically broken, the whole historic internet is broken. We need to propose a valid alternative. And as notice people as von lynX or GNUnet project developers, we can, without client–server model, make a way simpler, easier, more resilient, adaptable, flexible, dynamic, decentralized, local, featured, extensible, scalable, secure and freedom-compliant Internet. Debian will not include GNUnet by default. Trisquel unlikely too I think. Same for Parabola and others. The real problem is not javascript, the real problem is the Web itself. The real problem is centralization, client–server model, centralized distribution, random (not deterministic or reproducible) builds, vertical decision processes, bureaucratic processes, rigid/unextensible/hard-to-hack software, etc. A GNU System would be more likely to fix that. Imagine a P2P DVCS implementing features of all possible asynchronous communications (replacing NNTP/newsgroups, mail, mailing-list, forums, web, RSS, blogs, microblogging, package repositories, git/bzr/DVCSes, github/gitorious/sourceforge/savannah/gna, etc. and making each media/message/post/comment in each of these “compatible”: able to connect to others trough a *real* semantic web, as comments, answers, versionning, threads, status or whatever, building a true *social* *network*, unlike authoritarian antisocial centers) anonymously, scalably, with the ability of automatically rebuilding a physical network if needed. Just like did firechat in HongKong with bluetooth, like it’s possible to do with electrical systems/powerline, radio, long range WiFi, LiFi (visible light WiFi), ultrasounds, vibrations, etc. Or even the ability, on the current Internet, to obfuscate with pseudo-SMTP, HTTP, bittorrent, DNS (and here you get an usage to all free hotspots present all around the Occident), free webmails… and even with steganography if necessary: something like a great amount of the Internet is made of cats and porn, going to be more and more Full-HD, really big, and passing trough fiber, possible to hide things here, Al Qaida do it for instance, why not freedom activists? Using for that functional programming, meshes, DHTs, hashes, cryptography, new compression algorithms (opus, speex, vp8…), unified APIs (even seeing the Hurd freeed from POSIX could allow to abandon some old concepts and using new ones potentially useful of new possibilities of distributed sharing and development (including art mash-up))… I see that as potentially useful to freedom, to (political, in the large meaning) education, to neutral internet, free software and development of creative abilities of humans on Earth (possibly including programming or engineering abilities potentially useful to free software). It could be really powerful to make the GNU System an unified but distributed platform to developing, proposing and diffusing the future of computing freedom. These are *really* the strongest issues in freedom. The Internet, the development process (security, trust, obfuscation, corruption, etc. everything Edward shown), the creative development of material (including not only growing sharing of videos, music, etc. but also what’s being developed with things as arduinos, 3D-printers, which are able to print growing diversity of materials, even semiconductors I heard). Everything of that is crucial to Free Software movement. So yes, GNU System could be just *great* to struggle for freedom.
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
