All, thanks for your contribution! I will try to give a summary below. Am Donnerstag, 8. Dezember 2016, 02:35:00 CET schrieb Aleksa Sarai:
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;
Well, we are definitely not an FSF-approved distribution because we distribute proprietary software (and also maintain repositories of proprietary software). I would argue that we, by extension, are not a "free software distribution" in the strict sense of the word -- but note that Debian is also not a "free software distribution" either.
I doubt RMS's laptop uses open source hardware, completely unencumbered by patents, but I won't begrudge him on that.
Because such a laptop does not exist, but he (and others) are trying to make it happen.
The problem is a system management chip from Intel, where the tech specs are completely hidden by Intel. No info about it is disclosed (according to an article in german c't magazine). FSF and one company refurbish old ThinkPad T400 models with an open SM chip - so here we ahve a kind of open hardware, at least in the eyes of FSF.
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.
Please add these comments to this FATE request[1] I made a few months ago. I think it should be on the "Additional Repositories" page, with a checkbox saying "[X] Enable proprietary repositories". This signals two things to the user:
1. The use of proprietary software is an *addition* to openSUSE, which can be used without proprietary software.
2. That removing proprietary software from openSUSE is really as simple as checking a box. There's no need to manually blacklist the repos / patterns (which is what I currently do).
Actually I like this approach of an additional checkbox that makes users aware of the proprietary nature. And I feel we are all aligned that we should not make installation less user friendly for the sake of beeing totally free software. On the other hand, an average user cant judge if he requires proprietary drivers. A check/scan tool would be ideal, but probably a PITA to maintain. A weaker solution is the hint with the non-oss repo that it may contain soft/ firmware that is needed to run the computer. You may try without first, and it your computer does not work properly, come back and enable non-oss. MAy sound scary, and not as neat as the automated scan. On the remark from Per:
Could you sum up the benefit to the end-user in one or two sentences, please. Wrt freedom and functionality, anyone who uses an iPhone clearly favours functionality over freedom, and I suspect the same might apply to many of our members.
Anyone using an iPhone is probably not aware of the whole freedom discussion, but is most likely driven from other factors, like the assumption of being cool, or simple brand addiction. And the perception that iAnything is easy to use (what I personally cant share). So as long as someone does not see freedom as a personal value, there will be no change in behaviour. Snowden/NSA/BND or not. Some just remain ignorant, but that should not stop us from supporting the idea for free/libre software Cheers Axel -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org