Re: Dangerous precedent being set - possible serious violation of the GPL
On Sun, Dec 05, 1999 at 09:13:17AM -0700, Richard Stallman wrote:
> What does it mean to make a new GNU/Linux distro that is more
> user-friendly and entirely free? How would it differ from Debian?
> It seems to me it would differ in two ways:
>
> 1. It is entirely free. You could achieve this starting with Debian
> by eliminating the non-free and contrib categories (the definitions
> may need a little adjustment), getting rid of some links to them,
> changing some HOWTOs, and a few other things.
>
> 2. It has some additional software for user-friendliness.
>
> If you think about it, #1 is basically equivalent to what I've been
> asking people to do since about a year ago: to make *in effect*
> a version of Debian which has only the free software (main and non-us).
>
> But instead of forking the whole distro, I've proposed doing this by
> making some structural and configuration changes to make it possible
> for these two versions of GNU/Linux to share almost everything.
> That seems both more efficient and more friendly.
>
> As for #2, that software needs to be written, but Debian would
> gladly accept it I am sure. So there is no need to fork, no need
> to make a separate project--not for reason #1 and not for reason #2.
I see three other reasons to eventually fork :
1. I cant recommond Debian to GNU/Linux newbies. So I have to
reccomend them some not-100% free distro. The whole Debian is too
difficult to change. It *may* be easier to fork.
2. Debian's packages quality is very inequal. We cant force
Debian to make Quality Standards, and if maintainer of some
package dont think this is a bug, we can do nothing.
3. Debian is going out very rarely. Potato and half is
very good idea (is anyone sure woody will be in 2000 ? Im not)
Our possible distro have to be .deb compatible.
And will probably share also most of base and
many other packages.
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