Re: [gNewSense-users] RE: I decided to abandon gNewSense

[Sam Geeraerts]

Mu schreef:
> 2009/5/19 David Sterry <address@hidden>:
> > Referencing the Community Guidelines at
> > http://wiki.gnewsense.org/Main/CommunityGuidelines everyone please take note
> > that we as a community do not want to be recommending or supporting non-free
> > software. There are many places to get support and recommendations for such
> > things. It is our goal to help gNewSense users by strictly supporting only
> > free software.
>
> Sorry, if you don't want, I won't do this again, but I thought that
> downgrading to Ubuntu would be less bad than falling into XP. I
> thought it could help to return to gNS in a not so far future.
>
> I like this project a lot, but I think it is difficult for newbies to
> face the problems they can find using this distro, and even more
> difficult to understand the reasons to face them.
>
> If that bothers you, or goes against the rules, I won't do it again. I
> wanted only to help, sorry if I caused inconvenience.

It's great that you want to help and I hope you will continue to do so.

Ubuntu might be less bad than Windows, but that still doesn't make it 
good from a free software point of view. I hope you can see why we have 
the policy outlined in our community guidelines. Recommending non-free 
software diminishes the importance of software freedom and so must be 
avoided.

There may be some inconveniences to using gNewSense and people who are 
less freedom-aware and technically savvy could experience some 
frustration with it. But then it's our job to explain to them that the 
problems they're facing are actually solutions, even if it's difficult 
for them to understand. If you will only recommend free software to 
those who already chose it, then you'll be preaching to the choir and 
gNewSense would not gain many new users. This would set gNewSense on the 
path of becoming an "elitist" operating system (as some have already 
accused it of being).

gNewSense is not just for the free software hacker "in-crowd". It's also 
for me and for you and for Patrick and for the rest of the world. We 
need hackers to improve the software and take out the non-free bits in a 
practical way. But we need newbies to ask the questions that make them 
(and us) understand software freedom better, to comment (and report 
bugs) from a non-technical perspective and to help us improve the 
documentation so that our goal will be easier to understand and our 
software will be more accessible for new users.