[GNU-linux-libre] Re: any Free BSD variant?

[Daniel Clark]

Rubén Rodríguez Pérez wrote:
> El jue, 14-05-2009 a las 21:49 +0200, Giuseppe Scrivano escribió:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> is there any completely free BSD variant (or at least just the kernel)?

So not confirmed to be or not completely free, but I know of these
variants you might want to look into:

* Debian/kFreeBSD - Debian (mostly GNU) userland with FreeBSD kernel -
http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/

* For a while GNU Darwin was listed on the gnu.org free distro page as
something that needed to be verified; it's gone now, but I don't know
why or if anyone determined that it was nonfree somehow (Darwin is
apple's changes to FreeBSD kernel I think.) - http://www.gnu-darwin.org/

> OpenBSD does not contain binary blobs, and all the code they publish is
> free software, but some ports are "contrib" -in debianese-, as they are
> free scripts to install non free programs, which is not good.

I think it would be even easier on a technical level to create and keep
updated a GNU OS distribution based on OpenBSD than a GNU OS based on
Debian or Ubuntu (such as gNewSense and Trisquel), since

(a) you wouldn't need to fight against blobs in the upstream repository,

(b) the entire distribution is in a single source code control repository,

(c) "make world" works, and

(d) the major thing we object to, the non-free software in ports, could
be solved just by making a copy of the distribution without ports and
with name changes in some places to avoid pointing at upstream nonfree
repositories.

Socially it might be tricky to form a collaborative relationship, since
Theo (who I really respect for his technical achievements; I do not know
him at all personally) has had well-publicized flame wars with rms (to
be fair the flames were mostly one-sided; I really respect rms' ability
to not be drawn into ad hominem attacks no matter what is said to him);
but OpenBSD is larger than Theo and the Free Software movement is larger
than rms, and OpenBSD team seems to respect technical contributions no
matter the source, so I wouldn't think getting non-freedom-specific
patches etc. accepted would not be hard.

With regard to (d) ports, the most obvious solution would be to create a
 derivative of OpenBSD ports without the nonfree software. I think this
option would be workable but have a few disadvantages; primarily OpenBSD
ports favors BSD-licenses software, whereas we would probably prefer a
primarly GNU userland; and any work done on the ports would not be all
that usable outside of the freed OpenBSD distribution.

Another option would be to create something like Debian/kFreeBSD, eg
freeDEB/kOpen (I'm sure there could be a "fun" thread on the naming; the
example is obviously pretty horrid), with only the OpenBSD kernel and
primarily GNU userland.

Another option would be to use a different ports tree. Unfortunately
there do not seem to currently be any non-distro software ports trees
that are only free software currently.

Examples of cross-distro ports trees that may include nonfree software
include pkgsrc - http://www.pkgsrc.org ; and OpenPKG -
http://www.openpkg.org/ (although I have not spent time to verify if
they contain nonfree software or not, I have not seen any language on
their web sites stating that is a goal).

Another currently not entirely free cross-distro ports tree I am
especially interested in is nixpkgs - http://nixos.org/nixpkgs.html -
they are willing to integrate a feature into their build system that
would track licensing - see the thread at
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.distributions.nixos/1023 - with this
feature added and the upstream package repository updated to use it
(shouldn't take all that long), it would be pretty trivial to create a
tool to generate a free version of the repository, and they have
well-documented tools to create an automated compile farm.

This would have the advantage of benefiting users of all GNU OS
distributions in addition to the users of the BSD kernel variant. (The
port mentioned in the thread is now a back-burner project of mine at
gnupure.org)

I'm now going to be lazy and use a slightly edited IRC conversation to
expound upon the most nifty feature of nix from a freedom point of view:

* djbclark: dachary: nix concept; I should explain that. It's sort of
like another repository, but because of the way nix works without the
danger of somehow fucking up other things on your system.

* dachary: what is "nix" ?

* djbclark: dachary: http://nixos.org/about.html and also there is a
useful academic paper I'll get the URL for in a sec...

*  djbclark:
http://www.st.ewi.tudelft.nl/~dolstra/pubs/secsharing-ase2005-final.pdf
http://www.st.ewi.tudelft.nl/~dolstra/pubs/nspfssd-lisa2004-final.pdf

* djbclark: dachary: The papers make it sound really complex, and indeed
the back-end probably is, but it's far easier to add packages to nix
than say debian in my experiance so far, as they have a domain-specific
language and standard environments for most build systems, so you can
actually just do it by working from other example packages and reading
just a tiny bit of the (very thourough) docs.

* djbclark: dachary: This is the line that clinched it for me in terms
of being "the right" solution for a libre distribution:

* djbclark: Nix's transparent source/binary model is a unique feature
for a deployment system. Relative to binary-only or source-only
deployment models, it adds the complication that we do not only need to
authenticate binaries but also the fact that they are a bona fide result
of certain sources.

* djbclark: What makes me nervous about gnewsense, trisquel at all is
that we are in most cases just trusting that the available binaries are
producible from certain sources (since they are just copied from
upstream; I don't know what blag's situation is).

* djbclark: Also, I've seen Brett (aka The GPL Compliance Lab) spend a
week to set up arcane build systems to verify binaries are actually
producable from provided sources; not only does nix make this trivial,
if you believe the implementation it even makes actually doing the build
unnessisary.

-- 
Daniel JB Clark   | Sys Admin, Free Software Foundation
pobox.com/~dclark | http://www.fsf.org/about/staff#danny

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