Re: Privileges and practicalities [was: Re: [ELPA] New package: repology.el]

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > > What GNU project promotes is free software. GNU never says to its
  > > users to use exclusively free software and never condemns people for
  > > using proprietary software.

  > Yet it maintains a blacklist of common GNU/Linux distros and labels them
  > as "unethical", even if these distros (like Debian and Fedora) have a
  > clear policy to exclude anything non-free from their main repositories.

This is a miscommunication.  You and Jean are talking about different
things.

Jean is presenting the GNU Project's moral philosophy.  We say that
every nonfree program is an injustice, so recommending a nonfree
program for use is unethical.  To lead users to run it is unethical.

When we say that a distro is unethical, that simply means that the
distro contains or recommends or leads users to run nonfree software.
Nothing other than that.

It's not a personal criticism of the distro developers.  I'm confident
that the Debian developers and the Gentoo developers are honest and
follow their moral codes.  We don't mean to criticize them as people.

We try to make this clear in gnu.org/distros.  If you see anything
there which is not clear, please write me privately and show me the
text you mean.



-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)