Am Montag, 2. Januar 2017, 20:41:54 CET schrieb Aleksa Sarai:
Just out of curiosity: what is wrong (from licensing point of view) with VMware drivers?
I don't know. Good question. I assume that the FSF is not happy, but I don't know if it is the drivers or the virtualization engine.
If they are not happy about GPL2 of VMware drivers (which they apparently aren't, otherwise they wouldn't invent things like GPL3), they are probably not happy about linux kernel as a whole either. :-) (Well, thinking about it, they actually are not very happy about it.)
The reason they aren't happy with Linux is because the upstream version has proprietary code inside it (in the form of .ihex code without corresponding source). And Linus doesn't care (and hasn't cared since the late 90s) -- which is why the FSF supports the Linux-libre project (which de-blobs Linux).
Strange. RMS just claimed that Linux is part of GNU, it uses lots of GNU stuff, and therefore it should be called GNU/Linux. [1]
RMS has never claimed the Linux is "part of GNU" (I can't read the article you linked, but if you've ever seen a talk by him in the past 25 years he makes it very clear that Linux and GNU are separate projects). Yes, GNU is generally distributed with Linux as the kernel, but you can also have GNU/kFreeBSD, GNU/Hurd or more recently GNU/NT.
Hm, I have seen several of his presentations (or lets better say - several times more or less the same presentation) , and he made it very clear. Have a look at slide 36ff of [1]
The operating system the GNU project had initiated passed away after Linux got more and more successful.
GNU is an operating system. Hurd is a kernel, and so is Linux. GNU still exists (you're running it *right now*, and so am I).
Correct, I should have said 'The hurd kernel passed away' In the interview RMS stated that '...Hurd has lost the race [against Linux], but what matters is that we have a free kernel ...' I could not read from this, that the Kernel except the file foo.bar (proprietary) is part of GNU/Linux. RMS did not distinguish in the presentation nor in the interview.
And the reason the FSF doesn't like the VMWare drivers is because VMWare the company has *allegedly* infringed on the GPL in the case of busybox (and Linux).
Can someone explain the animosity towards the FSF? We owe a lot to them, and it's not fair to smear them by claiming that the reason why they do not support distributions such as us is because of trivial reasons. Their concerns _are_ legitimate IMHO.
No idea! Maybe it is the black and white view, while most users would accept grey as well to get their system up and running?
Yes, the FSF is incredibly opinionated and many users don't care. My point is that their reasons are not trivial (user freedom is a legitimate problem and it is a huge problem that users don't care about it too). Each time this topic comes up in the IT community, people pretend that the FSF's work is not important ("what we're doing now is good enough, you don't need to go as far as the FSF is proposing") and it really pisses me off.
Without the FSF, you would very likely not have free (as in freedom) compilers, free (as in freedom) operating systems, free (as in freedom) web browsers, free (as in freedom) text editors, free (as in freedom) web servers, free (as in freedom) games, free (as in freedom) cryptography, and so on.
Very true. But coming back to the original subject, and what the project can/should do to make the freedom more visible - I feel from the discussion we have a majority for the proposal that the usage of the non-OSS repo should be an option, not a default. Do we need a poll on that? How do we get it set-up for the next release? Or do we drop it at all? Cheers Axel [1] https://static.fsf.org/nosvn/RMS_Intro_to_FS_TEDx_Slideshow.odp -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org