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diff --git a/_drafts/letter-bkuhn-moral-absolutism.rst b/_drafts/letter-bkuhn-moral-absolutism.rst new file mode 100644 index 0000000..d228c66 --- /dev/null +++ b/_drafts/letter-bkuhn-moral-absolutism.rst @@ -0,0 +1,100 @@ +title: Open letter to Bradley Kuhn on moral absolutism +date: "" +tags: + - Fedora +--- + +(this slightly edited composition of the email thread I have sent to +`Bradley Kuhn`_) + +.. _`Bradley Kuhn`: http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/ + +Hi, Bradley, + +the common theme in my in this the moral absolutism (which I am not +using as a swearword, being a Christian I am more against the more +common moral relativism). The danger for each moral absolutist is that +she has a tendency to lump all those who don’t measure up to her +standards in the category of “heathens/proprietary software users” and +not distinguish between them. + +Listening to FaiF 0x43 I paused in surprise when you compared Leo +Laporte to David Pogue. I don't know enough about the latter but +I listen to many podcasts by the former, and I know that with some and +few (expressly mentioned) exceptions all gadgets he presents are bought +in ordinary stores for his own money (which was the cause of `his +blow-up with Mike Arrington`_ ). Of course, now when TWiT is +a multi-million company it is less of the problem with him, but I know +he has done so always. Of course, I am also appalled by his love for all +things Apple and sometimes lack of understanding intricacies of the free +software world, but he is always expressly giving preference (when +available) to open source (especially in the context of the security +software) and he supports mostly out of his pocket `FLOSS Weekly`_ which +is currently one of the best resources on FLOSS universe. I really don't +think it is fair to lump him in one bag with David Pogue (about whose +standards I know almost nothing, so I am not expressing my opinion about +him). + +.. _`his blow-up with Mike Arrington`: + http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laIvHUg35SQ +.. _`FLOSS Weekly`: + http://twit.tv/show/floss-weekly/ + +The second is the line in the John Sullivan's talk. I work for Red Hat +so I know number of people in the Fedora Community and I know many of +them are bit offended by the FSF refusal to mention Fedora on its list +`Free GNU/Linux distributions`_. Comparing to other popular distros (I +know it is for commercial reasons and not for goodness of our hears) we +completely refuse to include any non-free non-firmware software in our +distros and there is no link anywhere on any Fedora-controlled sites +about non-free repositories. Moreover, I don't agree with FSF concerning +firmware (I don't see much difference between microcode in chips and +firmware blobgs ... so in order to be truly free you should be using +only those Chinese MIPS notebooks; do you?), but ignoring this +difference of opinions, I would think Fedora (and CentOS) would deserve +some kind of special treatment, a bit different than Ubuntu or some much +promoted Debian (with non-free repository alongside the free ones). + +.. _`Free GNU/Linux distributions`: + http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html + +The same goes for CentOS. In this case the FSF distro list has actually +a factual error -- it is not true that “there's no clear policy about +what software can be included”. CentOS packages are only what’s in RHEL, +which is always strict subset of what goes to Fedora, so there is pretty +strict limit on what packages are included in CentOS. Yes, I know that +RHEL itself has also supplementary packages which are non-free, so +I admit that it shouldn't be on the list (well, it is way better than +Debian, because there are way less packages provided in the +supplementary repository, but that is just a distinction of quantity not +quality), but there are quite certainly no packages provided by Red Hat +for non-customers, and so CentOS consists only from packages with source +code on the `Red Hat FTP`_. + +.. _`Red Hat FTP`: + ftp://ftp.redhat.com/redhat/linux/enterprise/ + +The result of moral absolutism on the side of FSF (back to the original +theme) is that free-distros page contains only more or less irrelevant +distros (sorry, if certified on h-node could include for example +`Thinkpad T430u`_ which has non-supported WiFi, then it is hardly +something I can recommend to my friends). How much difference for the +promotion of freedom has a distro which not many people can use? When +was the last somebody was converted to the free software (or +more-or-less free software) by Ututo? Of course, the same goes for +Replicant_ ... what value is there in a phone OS which doesn't allow +telephoning?^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hupdate: looking at Replicant status +apparently telephoning is not such problem as WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS. +Interesting. + +.. _`Thinkpad T430u`: + http://h-node.org/notebooks/view/en/1233/ThinkPad-T430u/ +.. _Replicant: + http://redmine.replicant.us/projects/replicant/wiki/ReplicantStatus + +These are my notes in the moment. Sorry, I just needed to vent +somewhere. + +Best, + +Matěj |