Re: [GNU-linux-libre] review PureOS ISO

[Ivan Zaigralin]

> I will stop responding to mails trying to attach our OS with our
> hardware. This is for FSF Free distro endorsement, and the other is for
> RYF hardware - stop combining the two things.

Though an FSF member, I am not a part of the team that makes the determination 
for FSDG compliance, so my comments are strictly advisory.

Also, I am always in the market for freedom-respecting laptops, and I 
certainly hope I can use your products one day, since they look and sound 
awesome. I wish you luck in your business venture and I hope you will succeed 
in fully liberating your hardware, and getting that approved by FSF as well. I 
certainly think it should be your goal, given your philosophy.

With that being said,

You are the ones who combined OS and hardware by putting both things on the 
same website. In fact, the page where you peddle non-free laptops is literally 
one click away from your OS page, and in the same domain. The FSDG could not 
be clearer on this point: it will not approve any project that advertises 
and/or delivers non-free software, and it doesn't matter whether this non-free 
software is technically a part of the OS, as long as its endorsement comes 
from the same project. For example, Trisquel could never get approved if they 
used their domain to suggest installing adobe flash, nevermind whether they 
distribute it themselves.

So far in this conversation you have been offered an extremely easy and clear 
way to fix this issue, simply by decoupling the OS from your hardware 
business. For reasons I do not quite understand, you ignored that suggestion 
completely. If PureOS wants to be even considered for the FSF endorsement, it 
should at the very least create a separate domain for itself, and remove all 
endorsement of non-free hard/software from that domain. This is FSDG 101. You 
can still endorse and recommend PureOS from the non-free hardware side, but 
not the other way around. Your PureOS front may not willfully lead users to 
non-free software, how hard is that to understand? Once you have a free 
laptop, you will be able to advertize that particular product from the PureOS 
side, but not your whole business, not for as long as you business has any 
non-free options available for sale.

> We are mirroring Debian main archive for that and AFAIK Firefox is
> entirely FLOSS, but it allows non-free extensions. It would be a bit
> radical to remove it because users can access non-free extensions - we
> can use lynx to access websites that promote nonfree things etc etc. I
> think many distros used Iceweasel and now will use Firefox if they are
> based on Debian - and again, Firefox is Free software AFAIK.

Once again, you seem to be ignoring the suggestions designed to get you 
approved. The stock Firefox fails FSDG, as so does every Mozilla product that 
leads users to install non-free addons via the addon interface. No one is 
arguing with you on this, we are simply telling you this issue has been 
discussed to death already, and the conclusion reached by the FSDG compliance 
team is what I just said. You stand no chance getting the endorsement while 
you distribute a browser which suggests non-free addons, period. I am well 
known around here for criticizing Icecat, so I am not saying that's what you 
must use to replace Firefox, but you will have to replace it with something, 
be it Icecat or or your own homebrew, so long as it fixes all the same issues 
Icecat had to fix in order to become compliant.

As an aside, you seem to be conflating free software with FSDG, but they are 
not the same at all. FSDG is much stronger: it certainly implies that the 
entire OS in question must be free software, but there is much more on top of 
that. Some versions of Firefox and Thuderbird, for example, may well be free 
software, but they also clearly fail FSDG, and so does the PureOS website in 
its present state.

I really hope this has been helpful. Once again, I wish more capable 
distributions would join the FSDG ranks, and I hope you will see the reason 
behind our comments and start taking meaningful steps towards making the 
PureOS project more user-friendly.

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