background of the question is a discussion I recently had with R. Stallman. According to his point of view, openSUSE is not free software, as unfree components are installed.
Lets take a look at the definition of freedom [1]. Free software allows you to - execute a program - distribute it - analyze and modify the source code - re-distribute the modified program.
While I like this thread's direction overall, I have two things that we probably already know but which may be worth pointing out. 1. RMS, whom I think is pretty great as an evangelist, is more-interested in free as in speech (libre) rather than free as in beer (gratis), though I think technically he encourages both in software. openSUSE clearly meets the latter definition, so we're dealing with the former. 2. Free as in speech is great, and openSUSE is clearly open source software, so it meets this definition as long as you ignore that we also bundle some things to be convenient to end users. RMS says this is a no-no, and perhaps we can improve it, but there's a continuum between completely-proprietary and completely free; I doubt RMS's laptop uses open source hardware, completely unencumbered by patents, but I won't begrudge him on that. 3. If somewhere in the distro's install we provide a way to opt for non-OSS software, I think it should be an opt-out. It would be fun to be able to have that as an opt-in (to non-free software) because it was not wanted by most, but I think in this case the membership probably cares less about non-OSS stuff the way we do it than they care about using perfect FOSS (I'm certainly open to contradiction here; my sample size is small, being just me, myself, and I). One more prompt during an install seems unnecessary. Perhaps on the summary screen before an install, where the Software is listed, a link could be there to disable the non-OSS packages, so it's nothing more than a click, like enabling sshd and opening the firewall port for it. Aaron Burgemeister -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org