FSFLA/ blogs/ lxo/ 2008-08-11-linux-libre-and-freed-ora.en

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Blonging for Freedom

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Bruce Byfield asked me a number of questions about Fedora Freedom and Linux-libre back in mid July, for this article.

Oddly, he contacted me shortly after the longest thread ever started on fedora-list, and the article was published shortly before the threads spun out of it finally died.

Anyhow... The article seems to have triggered some interesting reactions in the Debian community, as well as the usual unsubstantiated FUD.

As for the Fedora discussions, a number of people seem to have got the impression that the entire thread was about the same topic. This couldn't be farther from the truth.

It started addressing the question of why Fedora fails to abide by the Guidelines for Free System Distributions, but flame bait quickly hijacked the thread into a long argument about the appropriateness of calling the combination of the GNU operating system with the Linux kernel GNU/Linux or GNU+Linux, which amounted to a large part of the thread and sub-threads. That part was further hijacked into a continuation of a one-month-before thread about the GPL on fedora-devel, and a some sub-threads went on to discuss differences between Open Source and Free Software movements, GPLv3, copyleft, and Free Software business models.

I like to collect posts in which I think I was fortunate in presenting the ideas, to be able to refer to them myself when similar situations arise. And then, it's also nice to be able to refer people to this list of postings, to get to some valuable bits without having to sift through several hundred messages.

On GNU+Linux naming, that I wrote about before, I'd like to highlight the exposure of the "Linux applications" fallacy, Linus' original take on it, the GNUdist olympics, the sub-thread a long rebuttal to the Linux-is-the-engine fallacy, particularly the reasoning that would lead to naming distros after GNU grub, and the sub-thread with subject creating an operating system with Linux but without GNU, not even autoconf stuff.

There are social reasons why this name matters to us; please help.

On differences between Open Source and Free Software movements, I'd like to highlight the differences in principles and strategy, summarized and expanded, and some of the attacks on us and contradictions.

On alleged restrictions established by the GPL, I'll highlight what a pure license is, discussion on conditioned permissions and the sub-thread Misunderstanding GPL's terms and conditions as restrictions, especially the translation of GPLv2's 2b "restriction".

On copyleft, I'll highlight the creation of "competing" copyleft licenses and their hamrful consequences, and the goals of copyleft, and the Short Strong Copyleft License.

On GPL compatibility, I'll highlight the practical issue with the original BSD license, and OpenBSD contradictions.

On GPLv3, I'll highlight its anti-DRM provisions.

This summary couldn't be complete without the apology. In fact, I'm sure it's not complete even with it. But it ought to be enough.

So blong,