Re: An open letter to the debian community
I think you bring up many problems and issues that debian has. but
i don't think any of these issues haven't been the issue of a flame
war sometime or another.
debian is based upon the ideal that free software should be available
without sticky licensing issues so that you could do just what you're
talking about: a fork of debian with all that nice non-free software.
i disagree with your assessment that the debian community doesn't want
beginner to use the software. there is movement towards centralizing
config (dconfig) and providing a easier interface for admin (apt and
associated apt frontends) and users (gnome and i believe kde will get
in there sooner or later; see the interview w/ Wichert [1]).
debian does carry a certain attitude that we need to hold the software
that we place in "main" debian to a higher ideal, but i think the
debian community does this without scacrificing your freedom to do what
you want and that you'd feel would better.
i think an interesting solutions to your problem might be some sort of
companion cd to debian that would provide all the non-free stuff so
that installing without a fast connection won't be such a nightmare.
me, i'll stick with debian as it is. just my $0.02
herbert
[1] http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/12/03/099221&mode=thread
On Sun, Dec 05, 1999 at 04:11:03PM -0500, David Blackman wrote:
> I love Debian, I use Debian, I administer Debian at my
> school. Why do I use Debian? Because my school uses it. Why does my
> school use it? Because they didn't like the GUIness of RedHat, and
> Slackware is just too much of a hassle. Plus, they were drawn to apt-get.
>
> Debian is a wonderful development model. Anyone can
> contribute to it. There isn't a large administrative hierarchy, the user
> base is the developers, the testers, and the end users. The bug
> reports are open to everyone. And everything must be Free Software,
> Free Software in the sense that it must be both open source, and
> modifiable. Open sourced program FooBarX, which doesn't allow modified
> binaries, is placed in non-free, for the user to download, but it's not
> part of the standard distribution. Program FooBarZ is closed source,
> binaries only, it's not part of Debian.
>
> So what's wrong with this? Debian is supposed to be a
> completely open source operating system, where everything adheres to
> the Debian free software guidelines. This is an operating system where
> I could replace every instance of Debian with foobar, and sell it for
> three thousand bucks a copy. And doesn't non-free have all those open
> source/closed binary packages, and all the packages under actual
> patents? And isn't a 4k script that I apt-get, which downloads and
> installs netscape for me in Debian friendly directories, just as good
> as including the 17 meg binary on the CD?
>
> No it's not.
> Take this hypothetical conversation:
>
> Okay, I've just installed Debian/GNU Linux (Don't forget the GNU!), it
> only took me 3 hours to get through all those cryptic installation
> questions. now where's my full featured web browser?
> <Well, either you've got small broken browsers (arena, gozilla),
> or a broken version of Netscape called Mozilla.
> Isn't Netscape available for Linux?
> <I>Yes, but it's not Free, so you need to download it. </I><BR>
> Now, can I edit my MS Office docs?
> You might be able to look at them, but definitely not edit them!
> What about this StarOffice thing I keep hearing about? <
> That's a 50 meg download.
> And WordPerfect 8?
> 25 meg download.
> I want to hear sound, I just type sndconfig, like in RedHat? <BR>
> No, we don't include the sound modules, you'll need to
> recompile the kernel by hand.
> What's a kernel? Whatever, when can I start editing graphics
> for my web site?
> Well, GIMP is the greatest piece of software ever, but it
> doesn't include GIF & TIFF support in Debian, so you'll need to
> download GIMP-nonfree. But after all, we're on a holy war to burn all
> GIFS anyway, use PNGs and JPEGS.
> Where's KDE? My friend at work uses it, it's so nice and easy. <BR>
> You see, the QT widget set wasn't under a Free license, so we
> yanked it, but now it's under a Free license, but we still have issues
> with KDE, so you'll have to use GNOME.
> And my TNT2/VOODOO3/G400 will work under this X thing right?
> 30 megs.
>
>
> Get the picture? Here's approximatley 150 megs of downloads so far (kernel
> sources + KDE + QT + SO51 + WP8 + X335). Add on top of this the lack
> of a packaged, up-to-date system, (Even Slackware is up to kernel 2.2.12, X335, with KDE and GNOME, compared to Debian, this is light years ahead) with a recent version of X, or
> a recent kernel, and you begin to wonder why people are still using
> Debian. It's simple -- because we're a bunch of techno-snobs. Debian's
> hard to use, and we like it that way. We'll leave it to Corel to make
> Debian easy. We don't WANT everyday users. We like Debian the way it
> is. We like feeling superior, adhering to a higher standard of Free,
> and the warm and fuzzy feeling we get from whizzing around a cryptic
> console in front of a newbie.
>
> Lately I've been thinking about forking Debian, into DWA,
> meaning Debian Without Attitude. We'll drop the attitude, and the
> pretenses, about what Free means, and get licensing deals with Corel,
> Netscape, and Sun, to include Wordperfect, Communicator, and
> Staroffice. We'll make the install process less cryptic, include
> non-free on the CD and forget the Debian philosophy, that the only
> way to learn is by doing it the hard way.
>
> I'm going to get flamed for this. I know it. We don't want to
> think we're techno-snobs. We want to think our distribution is
> superior. We want to leave out KDE. We don't want Joe Blow to start
> with Debian, if he's not man enough to face up to Debian, he can go
> buy, ("Ha! Buy!", we Debian snobs say) Red Hat.
>
> --David Blackman
> Perl/C Hacker
> Stuyvesant HS Sophmore
> david@whizziwig.com
>
>
> --
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