Open letter to Bradley Kuhn on moral absolutism
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:date: ""
:status: draft
:category: computer
:tags: bkuhn, free, FLOSS, morality, absolutism, puritanism

(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