[gNewSense-users] gNewSense three years on

[Paul O'Malley - gnu's not unix -]

Hi All,

When we first started this thing in 5th May 2006 (three years ago) we
thought we would only get enough attention to justify a couple of months
effort and it would die from a lack of interest. It is with a great deal
of pleasure I can say this did not happen.

Our initial goals of pointing out that:
(A) free software works, and
(B) non free software can bite you hard and therefore you should not run
it have been born out over time.

We aimed to do this by simply taking the highest profile distro of the
time and make it "free".

Perhaps we are right when we think gNewSense has caused more people to
focus on delivering Free as in Freedom software.

Certainly we caused some changes, SGI's GLX being the most prominent, we
are very grateful to all involved be it my initial conversation with
Peter Brown or the people in SGI, Red Hat, IBM , Xorg and others (you
know who you are).

A big thanks to Theo de Raadt who essentially caused Brian and I to have
a good hard look at this bug after his comments on a mailing list.

The builder a script Brian wrote and Karl and others have adapted to
remove the whole blob mess. This script helped get the "linux-libre"
project under way, well done to Alexandre Oliva and those involved for
this big community contribution.

It is now obvious that with the exception of eye candy a lot of good
stuff can be done with Free Software.

Along came mipssel and the longsoon and some people got very vocal and
others got very involved. The shortest path to getting this to work was
to fork the Debian mipssel.

There is a small active community around the whole gNewSense setup and
it is good. We have a much improved website thanks to Graziano and Karl.

So where to now?

Brian and I had a chat about this. We feel that we have brought this
project as far as we can. We would like others to take the reigns.
The primary concern to the person or people who want to take over is
Software Freedom, pure and simple.

We have found the FSF staff very supportive since they got behind this
project and sponsored space and bandwidth for the project. A big thanks
to them all past and present.

The seriously large thank you to all the cast section:

Thanks to the Irish Free Software Organisation for their support and
guidance.

Thanks to Mark Shuttleworth and all the people behind Ubuntu, without
which this project would never have gotten off the ground. The great
time we had with them in Sevilla.

Thanks to all at freenode who helped us get up and running, and let us
not forget lilo.

Special thanks to KVF for some guidance when I really needed it!

Finally I have one comment to make. Mako coffee?

Regards,

Paul