Re: [gNewSense-users] gNS accepted licenses

[MJ Ray]

"Kevin Dean" <address@hidden> wrote:
> I don't really see what's hard about this concept... The definition of
> "Free Software" has existed since the GNU project and the FSF were
> created in 1985. We're not redefining ANYTHING, we're just the first
> project to ENFORCE it in what is distributed.

That's clearly false.  The debian project has been enforcing for a
long time and I suspect there may have been others before that. debian
is centred on the free software definition, but its practical
guidelines have been used as the basis for another definition and so
started something like the game of whispers.  I know the practical
problems that the fork has caused, but I still think the freedom to
fork is a freedom worth keeping.  It has more good applications than bad.

However, gNewSense and debian have different approaches to freedom
because apparently FSF considers only programs to be software (so does
not apply the same definition of freedom to ebooks, for example) and
because the debian project has made some mistakes which we need to
fix.  So, which people should use depends on how they feel about
things like ebooks and how outraged they are by freedom bugs, as well
as whether they want more goodies from Ubuntu than debian has yet, or
easier access to debian's larger collection of software.

Hope that explains,
-- 
MJ Ray - see/vidu http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
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