On 12/21/2016 01:12 AM, Aleksa Sarai wrote:
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.
I'd rather like to see the extra screen where YaST asks for online repos removed and a generic link to list of online repos embedded into the installation summary screen instead. Those who really want to can disable the non-oss repo there then.
I was also in that discussion with RMS that Axel mentioned at the beginning of the thread (well, I actually started it :-) ). If the final goal is to be "blessed" by the FSF, the solution suggested by Ludwig would not be enough.
In addition, it's still obscuring any such choices from the end user. The additional repos screen is a good place to put such an option at the moment because (as an end user) you don't need to manually go through the repo list and know which ones are proprietary -- there's just a checkbox.
The FSF will never endorse (that is, list as free in their site) a distro containing pointers to non-free software. No matter how many information we provide about it being not free or whether it's disabled by default.
This is true. However, we cannot make such a jump in one step. First we start by making proprietary repositories more clearly marked so that users can disable them. Once we get feedback for that, we can consider making it opt-in. Once we get feedback for *that* we can consider removing them from the base install. And once we finally get feedback from that we can consider purging them from OBS.
Will it take time? Yes. Is it worth the work? IMO yes, but I understand that other people wouldn't agree.
Not saying we should aim for it (I don't think so), just clarifying expectations.
I think we should ask ourselves what proprietary software we are hosting and how many people actually use it. Given openSUSE's interesting legal position, we're actually one of the more likely mainstream distributions that could make the jump to FSF approval.
Given the openSUSE Project's build tools and systems these days the easiest way to achieve this for those that really care about it is probably to create a new kiwi image that spins a new "libre based off openSUSE" distro that ships the libre-linux kernel (i'm not sure if this is packaged anywhere yet) and has no association with ways to install proprietary software. There is still a long way to go before we can provide the experience most users want without giving them the ability to run free software. As a community project there is also know way we could stop community people from providing a way to access proprietary software packman already exists and this in itself could be enough to block FSF approval which is probably another reason why something separate based off openSUSE and sharing most of its packages would work better. -- Simon Lees (Simotek) http://simotek.net Emergency Update Team keybase.io/simotek SUSE Linux Adeliade Australia, UTC+9:30 GPG Fingerprint: 5B87 DB9D 88DC F606 E489 CEC5 0922 C246 02F0 014B