Re: When can we expect a version 1.0 of the GNU Operating System?

[Garreau\, Alexandre]

On 2014-11-21 at 10:08, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> FWIW, the distro built by the GNU Guix project has been making steady
> progress.  It’s surely far from being a “drop-in replacement” for
> Trisquel or other established distros yet, but I think it’s becoming
> quite good for hacker-style use cases, although it needs more testing.

I think that with its Gentoo-like configuration power, with reproducible
builds, and P2P, it could become the best existing package
manager/distribution supporting all users cases.

Gentoo has the inconvenience to use Python, have a complex (I find
rebuilding everything with LFS simpler you know) and incoherent package
managing system and needing recompiling *everytimes* (even when thousand
of users recompile the same thing on the same system to get almost the
same binary).

> Continuing with the same rate, we may well have 0.9 in 4 months and 1.0
> in 8 months.

Wow, that’s really encouraging. As much as the really quick development
of GNUnet or free neutral associative ISPs.

> That leaves a bit of time to resolve the naming issue.  In the meantime,
> I hope the project can gain more support from interested GNU hackers!

On 2014-11-21 at 09:28, Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
> The priority of the GNU project has always been to free users, not to
> develop the GNU system.  Since we have a free system, our priorities
> are to work on furthering the goal of freedom for all computer users.

The GNU system is aimed to free users. And in my humble opinion it could
better than other systems (the only really democratically developped,
development-diffused and upstream distro today is Debian, and —as
Mozilla Firefox— it’s not always making the best choices: see GNOME3,
systemd…).

> Right now one of the biggest struggles in front of us is non-free
> Javascript, see https://fsf.org/campaigns/freejs and how companies are
> trying to cripple computers for everyone with "Restricted Boot", see
> http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/campaigns/secure-boot-vs-restricted-boot.
>
> Putting explicit effort on release "the" GNU system would not help any
> of those goals, hence why work and thought on the GNU system is not a
> current priority.  Maybe when all software users are free from the
> shackles of software hoarders we can finish this, but until that day
> there are more pressing issues.

Yes it could, and even better. For administrative/political/whatever
reasons, W3C’s not going to make the web freeer, Firefox neither, and
HP, Dell, etc. are not going to make computers freeers alone. We need a
direct action against these.

Currently the only problem I see in the GNU project to fight against
that is centralization around rms, but beside that, all GNU hackers are
really doing a fantastic job. I never saw a such amount of creativity,
effort, work and freedom-friendly as concentrated in any other
organization I saw (meaning it’s rare, not it’s only GNU’s
particularity).

But see secure boot problem : we have some non-free distributions
authorized… and others… not. We see that because people don’t use enough
free software. And when they do, it’s for “open source” and practical
needs. We need to recall the importance and potential of freedom in
computing. Today is one of the most important moment in struggle for
freedom of all humankind history. We see crisis all around the world:
technical, ecological, economical, political (yet some days ago, France
*again* authorized unregulated censorship of the Internet without
passing by the judiciary power, only by police decision, if it’s
“terrorism”, large word defined by law as “strong trouble to order”,
“order” not being defined otherwise than growing authoritarian thought
of course)… And yet free software continue growing, yet free software
continue to have a growing importance in struggles around the world,
especially when we realize there’s only *one* thing really relevant in
humankind evolution: culture. knowledge. science. education.
communication. Human beings have the particularity to be purely social
animals. They’re entirely socially constructed. And what’s a society? A
sum of not all individual, but all *social interactions*, of
communications. Today we have maybe the third greatest and most
important invention of humanity after written communication and printed
communication: computer. And Free Software is at the core of that. As
said Benjamin Bayart, a famous free software/neutral internet activist:
“printer teached the people to read, Internet will teach it to write”
and “Internet and free software are two sides of the same object”.

So in the future Free Software will have a growing importance, and we’ll
need to face it. We’ll need more free systems. Not only more free
software, but more free hardware and more free networks, and to make all
of that more trustable (no more heartblead, corruption, or IETF/NIST
jokes). Work is being made on that, but we need to have the capacity of
following it.

And here comes my opinion: Guix with its functional system managing
could allow a distributed approach of system development. Not only we
could avoid crap decisions as “force GNOME3 on all desktops” (knowing
that GNOME3 already encouraged a pure SaaSS vision of desktop, and
continue to promote “open-source” philosophy), but we could spread
things such as GNUnet, at the core of all this process of liberation.

Here comes javascript problem: the real problem isn’t “people not making
javascript free”, the real problem is the user can’t control that easily
without boycotting a really relevant part of the web and abandoning
important features of it. Most useful features of web implies a
delegation of responsibility to servers, a centralized vision of
networking or the running of non-free javascript. I mean, not only
javascript under non-free licenses. I mean obfuscated javascript,
complexified JavaScript, changing-on-load JavaScript. JavaScript are
just programs made to be re-downloaded each time you run them, and
trusted invariably. It’s not enough putting a big filter on it. Of
course it’s necessary and it’s better than nothing. But to solve the
*real* problem we need to understand the Web is intrinsically broken,
the whole historic internet is broken. We need to propose a valid
alternative. And as notice people as von lynX or GNUnet project
developers, we can, without client–server model, make a way simpler,
easier, more resilient, adaptable, flexible, dynamic, decentralized,
local, featured, extensible, scalable, secure and freedom-compliant
Internet.

Debian will not include GNUnet by default. Trisquel unlikely too I
think. Same for Parabola and others. The real problem is not javascript,
the real problem is the Web itself. The real problem is centralization,
client–server model, centralized distribution, random (not deterministic
or reproducible) builds, vertical decision processes, bureaucratic
processes, rigid/unextensible/hard-to-hack software, etc.

A GNU System would be more likely to fix that.

Imagine a P2P DVCS implementing features of all possible asynchronous
communications (replacing NNTP/newsgroups, mail, mailing-list, forums,
web, RSS, blogs, microblogging, package repositories, git/bzr/DVCSes,
github/gitorious/sourceforge/savannah/gna, etc. and making each
media/message/post/comment in each of these “compatible”: able to
connect to others trough a *real* semantic web, as comments, answers,
versionning, threads, status or whatever, building a true *social*
*network*, unlike authoritarian antisocial centers) anonymously,
scalably, with the ability of automatically rebuilding a physical
network if needed. Just like did firechat in HongKong with bluetooth,
like it’s possible to do with electrical systems/powerline, radio, long
range WiFi, LiFi (visible light WiFi), ultrasounds, vibrations, etc. Or
even the ability, on the current Internet, to obfuscate with
pseudo-SMTP, HTTP, bittorrent, DNS (and here you get an usage to all
free hotspots present all around the Occident), free webmails… and even
with steganography if necessary: something like a great amount of the
Internet is made of cats and porn, going to be more and more Full-HD,
really big, and passing trough fiber, possible to hide things here, Al
Qaida do it for instance, why not freedom activists?

Using for that functional programming, meshes, DHTs, hashes,
cryptography, new compression algorithms (opus, speex, vp8…), unified
APIs (even seeing the Hurd freeed from POSIX could allow to abandon some
old concepts and using new ones potentially useful of new possibilities
of distributed sharing and development (including art mash-up))…

I see that as potentially useful to freedom, to (political, in the large
meaning) education, to neutral internet, free software and development
of creative abilities of humans on Earth (possibly including programming
or engineering abilities potentially useful to free software). It could
be really powerful to make the GNU System an unified but distributed
platform to developing, proposing and diffusing the future of computing
freedom.

These are *really* the strongest issues in freedom. The Internet, the
development process (security, trust, obfuscation, corruption,
etc. everything Edward shown), the creative development of material
(including not only growing sharing of videos, music, etc. but also
what’s being developed with things as arduinos, 3D-printers, which are
able to print growing diversity of materials, even semiconductors I
heard).

Everything of that is crucial to Free Software movement.

So yes, GNU System could be just *great* to struggle for freedom.

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