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Comment by yuhong | Hacker News Reader

proprietary OS products?

Their users are, de facto, locked into a few vendors who, because of this arrangement, can charge excessive rent. In part this is because of a tiny number of critical components that do not have libre licenses; in part it is because these vendors provide technical leadership to the larger community in forms that actively prevent organizing a truly libre OS.

Do you think that Red Hat and Canonical are a net negative for the community?

Which community? The Linux community and the free open source community or the Free software community?

I think it is certainly an arguable question for the Free software/GNU community although I expect most could agree that they are bet positive for Linux and open source in general.

I think that RH and Canonical are very problematic for the community. They are a mixed bag containing a lot of good, but also containing some critical problems (for the cause of freedom). So I like to speak frankly about those problems, when I can.

Why not point out viable alternatives while making the criticisms of those two? Debian has a pedigree of broad, long-term professional use and is 100% free in both senses (barring a couple of firmware binaries in the 'speech' sense).

Is Debian really 100% free? The Linux Kernel itself isn't 100% free, it has proprietary blobs. Sure, they can be removed, but I don't think Debian removes them by the default.

Anyways, I do agree that Debian should be the distribution the FSF should support instead of gNewSense.

Debian does remove them by default. One of the problems FSF has is with the contrib and non-free repositories

It's interesting to see that in the gnewsense wikipedia page that Debian considers some of the GNU documentation to be non-free because their license allows an author to say "you are not allowed to modify this part of the manual", which is somewhat against the spirit of the FSF's opinion on code.

So the FSF's (read: Stallman's) opinion is that not only should a distro ship with only 100% free software, that users should be actively prevented/discouraged from installing "non-free" software onto their computers?

This is why most people think he's a fucking crackpot.

Which components are you talking about? Firmware?

Given suitable hardware that doesn't need firmware blobs, distros like Fedora are 100% free software. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is also 100% free - you can download all the source from ftp.redhat.com and check that yourself.

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