Canonical Are Liars

[Ubuntu] is entirely committed to the principles of open source software development; no part of it will ever be proprietary, and we encourage people to use it, improve it and pass it on.

This is simply untrue, and I feel needs to be pointed out.

gNewSense is a version of Ubuntu that is truely committed to the principles of free software and no part of it will ever be proprietary. That is the distribution I most highly recommend for people to use, improve and pass on.

Since gNewSense is a very new project, a more mature GNU+Linux distribution I can also recommend is Fedora, but this includes small amounts of proprietary software in the form of “firmware.” This proprietary software is included in all other GNU+Linux distributions apart from gNewSense.

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The Canonical Are Liars by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
January 26, 2007 | Filed Under Personal Thoughts 

Comments

2 Responses to “Canonical Are Liars”

  1. MJR/slef on January 29th, 2007 1:41

    Or you could use debian, where proprietary software inclusion is a bug and volunteers have been working openly on licensing problems for a long time.

  2. David Crossland on January 29th, 2007 15:02

    Debian distributes many large pieces of non-free software, and its repository of non-free software is not going to be reduced or dismantled as an official part of the project any time soon, as far as I know. In contrast, although Fedora includes non-free firmware, it does not include any large pieces of non-free software in its repositories. Of course, there are other 3rd party repositories, and if Debian reduced its official non-free repositories to a similar level and allowed 3rd parties to distribute non-free software, it would have my support.

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