Hello Richard, After reading this thread, I was interested to see what your list recommendation really was, because I have never actually seen it!! So I headed over fsf.org which leads me to this page when trying to find out your list of recommended OS list:
http://www.gnu.org/links/links.html Is that the list there? My guess is that if you were to endorse OpenBSD you would have put a link under "Other free operating systems"... under which, there were 2 interesting systems: GNU/Darwin, based off Apple's userland and kernel, and ReactOS, designed specifically to run MS software. So I have looked into them a bit more... Your main complaint about among the BSD's are that they have a ports system that can be used to install non-free software. In the case of OpenBSD, ports system were not even included, OpenBSD merely includes instruction to install the ports system and how to use it. This is the same with your recommended system GNU/Darwin: http://www.gnu-darwin.org/index.php?page=ports Who also contains instructions to install the such port system. Considering that your main concern with ports system is that "it may lead people to install non-free software", well, what about ReactOS, whose _design goal_ is to _run_ non-free software? Before you argue that ReactOS is merely a free implementation of Win32 API, let me clarify: if the purpose of ReactOS isn't to run some Windows-only software S, then what is the purpose of ReactOS? if S was free, it wouldn't be Windows-only as it would have ported to free OS's. Remember that the Windows-only software that people are going to be interested to run are going to be non-free one. Cheers, Sun.
