It's my understanding that you have to go out of your way to enable the
non-free repos in vanilla Deb.
And that the Debian Project developers have voted several times on bumping
themselves up to FSF levels of purity, though the proposal has always failed.
That said, I think your first point was mostly right. There's not much reason
for anyone with half a clue to install Gnewsense (instead of Debian), unless
you count that extra purity as making the world a better place. And hell,
maybe it does.
The FSF taking a hard line is a good thing.
The Debian project having a social contract, no corporate overlords, and
opting to be the Universal Distro--a very good thing too.
If Gnewsense is where universality meets orthodoxy, then that's win/win. I
doubt I'll need a partition with this particular distro, but I'm glad to see
it finally update nevertheless.
