Re: [Fsuk-manchester] Ubuntu !free

[Simon Ward]

On Fri, May 02, 2008 at 10:00:25AM +0100, aidy lewis wrote:
> In last night's lecture Stallman gave some examples of free GNU
> distros. Ubuntu was not one of them.

Ubuntu is arguably free software, but the devil is in the details.
Stallman was talking about distributions encouraging the installation of
non-free software by providing the means to: The non-free section in
Debian, restricted(?) in Ubuntu.

Ututo and gNewSense don’t include non-free sections, and not even
‘cpan’, as the licences of CPAN modules are not always free.

> Why then does Ubuntu say it is free software:
> http://www.ubuntu.com/community/ubuntustory/philosophy

    “Currently, we make a specific exception for some "drivers"
    which are only available in binary form, without which many
    computers will not complete the Ubuntu installation. We place
    these in a restricted section of your system which makes them
    easy to remove if you do not need them.”

I suspect “Ubuntu is happy to call itself open source” is also not
giving it any kudos. :)

> If it is not free software, should we not raise a bug against Ubuntu?
> https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs

If there isn’t one already, I think there should be.

Simon
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