Anticipating that Flidas may not be available for some time, let me expand a
bit more on preliminaries. In future I intend to start a separate thread on
each one of them.
1. I believe that Trisquel should follow Debian, instead of Ubuntu. Reasons
being;
* Debian is the kitchen and Ubuntu is a restaurant. Following the kitchen is
always a step ahead of following its followers.
* Debian has 5 years of support too. ( https://wiki.debian.org/LTS )
* Following Debian means having both a LTS (stable) and a temporary rolling
(testing) distro concurrently, which solves the problem of lagging behind.
* Debian is more dedicated to free software than Canonical, which can reduce
DFSG compliance burden.
* Rolling out a LTS release is simple and streamlined. (as in Debian, just
freeze the rolling-testing)
2. I believe that a compromise between "being unique" and "being complete"
should be tipped -heavily- in favor of completeness. That is, less work
should go into things like "what apps should be installed by default?" and
more work should focus on things like "what workaround should be applied for
DFSG incompatible hardware, media formats, communications protocols etc."
Because application level functionality more or less is already there, while
compatibility issues are the main challenge that confronts any DFSG compliant
distro.
3. [Controversial] I believe that FSF should be pressured to fine tune their
compliance terms. Currently there are just two options: ideal and
unacceptable - black and white. Acceptable means ideal. This makes managing a
distro acceptable to both DSFG _and_ the masses an enormous and unyielding
task. I believe DFSG should expand on "ideal", "acceptable" (with minor
compromises), and "unacceptable" system definitions. There are certain minor
controversies over the "ideal" case, which, if acknowledged by FSF as "gray
but acceptable" cases, would lift a heavy burden off distro maintainers'
shoulders. I mean, like firmware blobs (not driver, just firmware),
proprietary software referrals or providing viaducts (not obligations or
inclusions), and the like. As far as I understand, they're all debatable gray
areas and don't really derail or spoil the free software guidelines.
I can't see how FSF could be coaxed into buying it, so this is rather a
speculative subject and could be postponed for the time being. I've presented
it here for completeness only. So much for controversies. :)
As I've said, in the future I'll try to expand on each one of them separately
in dedicated threads.
