2010/10/3 Aymeric Mansoux <[email protected]>:
> Ricardo Gabriel Herdt said :
> But this still won't make Debian a free system distro as they still
> provide a non-free repos then, making them (and Ubuntu) not usable for
> building a free derivative, unless you copy the whole repositories and
> filter them...

Can't you simply enable only the main repo, which only contains free
software? That's what debian does.

I think having a separate, non-free repo is a good solution, since one
can be sure that installing main won't contain non-free software, and
if some non-free stuff is needed, they can be installed on a safe and
stable way.
For example, I'm working in a public school in Brazil which received
hundreds of Intel Classmate laptops from the government , with a crap
distro (metasys) pre-installed. Right now, I'm building a live distro
to be used as liveUSBs by the children and teachers from the school,
and I choose debian. The problem is that all laptops come with a
wireless adapter that requires non-free firmware. So, what should I do
according to FSF? Install gnewsense and give the children computers
without internet access, killing the whole purpose of the UCA/OLPC
project?

Don't get me wrong, I do like FSF, it's really important to have an
organization fighting for the free software cause, but on this matter
I think they are just wrong. If debian's fault is to make it possible
to run free software on non-free hardware on a safe and tested way,
aren't, for example, Emacs developers doing the saming righting code
to make it possible to run this wonderful free App on a non-free OS?

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