On 12/23/2010 5:47 PM, Kostas Boukouvalas wrote:
My opinion is only that if just one of the gigantic distributions like Redhat-Fedora SLED/S-openSUSE and Debian-Ubuntu would decide one day to create a 100% free software edition of itself, that would help a lot to promote Free Software and have a very strong player, that gnewSense, Ututo and others are not and would take many years to catch.
I think you're looking for a solution to a non problem. I don't think promoting Free Software is an issue. I think promoting *Open Source* software is more of an issue. I've made my points already for why having a 100% free distribution would be an issue. In utopia, maybe a totally free big distribution would be possible. But in reality, it's impossible. Again, it's all about choice. I'm all for advocating open source alternatives. I'm all for advocating free software. But in reality it's impossible to have a functioning Linux distribution and not have closed source software. And in the end I'm really for advocating Linux as an alternative to Windows. And as long as the kernel can adhere to the GPL 2 license, I see no problems with having user land closed source software to make the transition to an open source OS easier. And until the FSF can offer alternatives instead of just being "don't use this, proprietary is bad" they're just a bunch of zealots really hindering the adoption of open source and are still taking a choice away, which is what open source is all about. If you want to promote Free Software distributions, nothing stops you from grabbing one of the officially FSF endorsed zealot ones and posting it on every blog you can and giving it to every friend you can. But when they come and say Free Software sucks, since that's the title you're hinging on, because their wifi card doesn't work and they can't play their collection of mp3s, don't forget to mention to them that there *are* alternative distributions that *do* allow these things to work and don't violate any open source licenses are not evil. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org