Re: A GNU Distribution

[Adam Spiers]

On Sun, Apr 08, 2012 at 04:32:50PM -0700, Karl Berry wrote:
> 3) as far as I know, all of the free distros (for reference:
> http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html) except for the
> not-very-well-known Dragora, are derived from nonfree distros.  It seems
> philosophically undesirable to me for a free system to have a nonfree
> system as an upstream.

What exactly do you mean by "upstream" here?  Only (a) that the free
system was *originally* derived from a non-free system, or
additionally (b) that it is also dependent on that non-free system on
an ongoing basis, and cannot survive without it?

The latter (b) is undesirable for obvious practical reasons, whereas I
can't see why the former (a) would be undesirable to anyone unless
they suffer from the typically unhelpful NIH syndrome.

> FWIW, it has always seemed to me that the biggest issue with making a
> GNU OS is simply that there has been no one with the time and energy
> needed to bring something into existence.  Many, indeed I would venture
> to say nearly all, GNU developers (including myself, sorry to say) are
> already well over capacity with existing projects, and putting together
> an installable OS is not something that can be done with a few stolen
> minutes here and there.

Sadly I fear you are absolutely right :-/

It would be easier by several orders of magnitude to declare a
standalone independent fork of a suitable upstream distro.  It made a
lot more sense to create IceCat than to rewrite Firefox from scratch,
so is this the best approach to the OS?  The political angle would
have to be carefully considered, as Daniel observed elsewhere in this
thread:

On Sat, Mar 31, 2012 at 02:40:33PM +0100, Daniel Martin wrote:
> I don't think that GNU is in the best position to produce a GNU/Linux
> distro. Would the system offer anything that isn't already available
> from other distros?  Again, I think the only reasons to do so are
> political. The only sane way to go about doing this would be to fork an
> existing distro and I think that would be viewed quite sceptically by
> the community (and rightly so).