2007/5/29, Vihan Pandey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
He is and he has also repeatedly praised the Free Software philosophy and DOES support efforts regarding the same.
But when it comes to developing launchpad, he has chosen not to be with the Free Software community, even though he had the power to decide that.
Try searching for GNU on their website you DO get references to Ubuntu GNU/Linux, Kubuntu GNU/Linux
It is by Ubuntu users and not the official stand of the project.
- It does not give importance to Freedom. what exactly are you referring to here? Yes their primary goal is giving GNU/Linux to the masses and yes they do make freedom secondary. Only making freedom secondary does NOT imply that they ignore it all together. You cannot compare them to a M$.
So, I support those who do give Freedom primary importance. "We can lose our freedom again just as we lost it the first time, if we don't care enough to protect it." http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/linux-gnu-freedom.html Surely they are better than M$ (or so i believed before reading the blogs linked below, now I have serious doubts of their intentions), but for me those who value Freedom more than merits is important and Ubuntu isn't one of them yet (they have promised to have a completely Free distribution and I will support that wholeheartedly).
- "Ubuntu is and always will be free of charge." there is no guarantee that it will remain Free Software After the M$ Novell deal and a not fully ready GPL v3 yet, how many projects can guarantee that they will remain Free Software?
"Debian will remain 100% free" from Debian social contract with the Free Software Community http://www.us.debian.org/social_contract "gNewSense is Free Software, its mission is to deliver these freedoms to you:" http://www.gnewsense.org/Main/Mission and others http://www.gnu.org/links/links.html#FreeGNULinuxDistributions
- On the contrary, they have clearly stated their willingness to include non-free softwares in their distribution. They do include proprietary drivers so new users can use the system, but other than that what other non free software are they packaging into Ubuntu?
There are Free drivers which work for most of the cases. "There are people like Torvalds that will pressure our community into use of a non-free program, and challenge anyone who complains to provide a (technically) better program immediately or shut up." http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/linux-gnu-freedom.html
- They don't believe in Free Software. Is this your opinion or did a Canonical/Ubuntu representative say this? If yes please do give that link as well.
It is my opinion (after all it is in my talk page, and other claims not mine are given proper references). Some more about launchpad and the dangers of a proprietary format: "What Canonical is trying to achieve here is to collect all the work that the free software have made and will made, and put them under their control. ............ , we all depend on Canonical to continue providing the service." http://www.joachim-breitner.de/blog/archives/60-Launchpad,-Google-and-why-Microsoft-is-not-the-problem.html he continues: "................By good marketing, clever programming and commercial pressure, they locked in a lot of people to use Microsoft products and formats. This is evil, but we have found a solution to that: reverse engineering and Free Software. Microsoft can be coped with. But Google and Launchpad were even cleverer. Instead of locking something in, they open everything: It is free, it has nice usable APIs to integrate in applications, and they suck all that opened data in and keep ahold of it. And while Microsoft has a record of doing a bad job when it comes to technical quality, thus helps the alternative, non-evil, Free Software, Google, and probably Launchpad, excels in what they doing, thus reducing the immediate need for alternatives altogether."
Again, do you have a web link that states this?
There much more in this study http://charismacode.blogspot.com/2007/01/powers-and-repositories-ubuntu-and.html
Nor do i want to restrict them by saying it will work only if you have this hardware it works else it won't - in fact that gives them the impression that it is me that is conditioning their freedom :-)
Except for th 3D stuff the Free drivers work for ATI and NVIDIA. Now if everyone start shipping the non-free drivers what is the incentive for those who provide Free drivers or the developer who reverse engineer it. I guess I will need to split the reply as it might not go through the size limit. Cheers Praveen -- പ്രവീണ് അരിമ്പ്രത്തൊടിയില് Join The DRM Elimination Crew Now! http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/Anti-DRM-Campaign
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