Julien Kyou wrote:
Using GNU as a descriptor 'even in the absence of GNU for freedom
respecting distros' feels right to me, its not credit its a brand. GNU =
Freedom, Should be true.
GNU does nothing to stop hackers from porting it to run on nonfree
kernels. Hence today we have GNU/kWindows (the GNU OS running atop the
kernel from Microsoft Windows), GNU/kFreeBSD (the GNU OS running atop
the kernel from FreeBSD), and GNU/HURD (the GNU OS running atop the HURD
microkernel).
There's no way to tell which of these are free software by looking at
only the name. We can be sure that the GNU portion is free software
throughout, but in the context of a distribution the kernel portion is
unknown. Distributions will sometimes take a free OS such as GNU, and
make GNU run atop a free kernel, and then include nonfree drivers. The
total end-product distributed to users is thus nonfree until the nonfree
parts are removed. I don't see how there could ever be a way of assuring
a user's software freedom by only mentioning GNU is included because one
will always have to do more work to know what else is included in the
distribution. Even a particular distribution that is free today can
include nonfree software in its repos, so as the FSF's approved distro
list criteria says monitoring this requires ongoing vigilance and a
mindset of fixing freedom problems.