Re: [Fsuk-manchester] Ubuntu !free

[Dave Love]

"aidy lewis" <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi,
>
> In last night's lecture Stallman gave some examples of free GNU
> distros. Ubuntu was not one of them.

Nor Fedora or Debian.  (Note that Debian reciprocates -- it's ripped out
stuff I wrote and/or put under the GFDL, which means Emacs is broken in
several ways, at least without the `non-free' repo you don't realize you
need stuff from.)

> Why then does Ubuntu say it is free software:
> http://www.ubuntu.com/community/ubuntustory/philosophy

A good question.  I intend to raise several things he said with him,
although not all of them are new, especially to be able to answer
questions like this, probably after some discussion here.  However, I I
know the partial answer here.

There are two issues as far as I know; they don't concern the licences
of the basic distribution.  One concerns non-free firmware present in,
or with, the kernel required to make various devices function.  The
other is they recommend, or facilitate the use of, repos of non-free
software (Debian's non-free and more blatant `partner' stuff in the case
of Ubuntu).

I've also heard the objection that Fedora and Ubuntu automatically
install non-free drivers (as opposed to firmware).  I don't think that's
currently true, although Ubuntu certainly enables it.  My Ubuntu desktop
won't run accelerated graphics/compiz or whatever, because it didn't
install the non-free ATI driver automatically, though it allows me to,
and propagandizes against non-free drivers in the process.