Re: Dangerous precedent being set - possible serious violation of the GPL

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

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.