A one person Linux distro departs
I know Crunchbang Linux is not a Libre Distro., based on Debian Stable with openbox and alot of custom scripts, however, I include this forum link where the developer (corenominal) announces the end of the distro., as food for thought for all "small" distros. Crunchbang was around for over 10 years I believe, and had a strong following, but corenominal announced today, that he is retiring and ending the project.
Now you know why FLOSS projects backed by a company like Canonical, Google, or Red Hat are more sustainable than 1 man teams. Makes you wonder how much longer Ruben can keep this project going and bleed money working on it.
Its sad to see Crunchbang go, but I never had a need to use it either.
Well, I'm happy to say that Ruben has greatly improved Trisquel's development process and made it easier to contribute. Now all we need is more volunteers...
I watched his recent interview. Does the FSF fund his work? He said that the donations are not enough to cover a salary ... that's not really fair.
It's easy to say that it's because the proprietaries have locked potential users into nonfree formats and protocols, and therefore people cannot choose freely which software engineers they want to support financially. But that doesn't address the more immediate issue. Is there anything more that we can do?
Also, is there a way to donate by cheque/mail? Or is that unsafe (or even not allowed in some places for tax/etc reasons?)
The FSF does not fund Rúben's work. The donations the Trisquel project receives come from us through the membership program ( https://trisquel.info/member ) and from one-time donations ( https://trisquel.info/donate ). Becoming a member is preferred because it makes the funds far more predictable what looks essential if a salary is to to paid. There are "alternative payment methods" to PayPal: wire transfer and bitcoin. https://trisquel.info/donate describes both.
There currently are 135 members:
$ wget -qO - https://trisquel.info/about https://trisquel.info/en/about?page=1 https://trisquel.info/en/about?page=2 | sed -n '/Associate Members/,/Registered Users/p' | fgrep -c 'tr class'
135
Here are the total amounts given through one-time donations since that possibility was offered for the first time (about four years ago):
$ wget https://trisquel.info/en/donate -qO - | tr '<' '\n' | awk '/td>donated/ { donations[$2] += $3 } END { for (currency in donations) print currency, donations[currency] }'
CAD 351
SEK 490
€ 3359.51
NZD 50
MXN 1324
CZK 250
BRL 25
PLN 170
SGD 15
DKK 50
CHF 340
£ 384
AUD 167
$ 9973.93
NOK 100
Thank you MB
I am a translator!
the first time I up voted something
now that needs a little appreciation :D
CrunchBang is not a "Linux distro". It is a "GNU/Linux distro": https://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html
Whoever wrote the FAQ did a great job (I made a few minor changes to his work here):
I notice this website refers to Trisquel as a distribution of "GNU/Linux" and not "Linux". Why?
There is a long-standing naming controversy. Most people who use the system today don't know that what they're actually using is the GNU system combined with the kernel Linux. For many years, the media and the user community itself has given undue weight to the contributions that come from Linus Torvalds' camp and fostered a skewed account of the operating system's history, while barely acknowledging the existence of the GNU project at all.
Richard Stallman started the GNU Project in 1984. He set out to develop a complete free operating system, because none existed at the time. Its design closely followed that of Unix because Unix was highly machine-portable and (at that time) pervasive.
Linus Torvalds did not write a whole operating system, he only wrote the last missing piece, a kernel, and he only did that in the first place because development of Hurd, the GNU project's own kernel, was lagging behind (and has not been completed to this day).
Torvalds' released his kernel Linux as proprieatry software in 1991. He was persuaded (by who?) to release Linux kernel under the GNU General Public License; he did so the following year.
The phrase "open source" wasn't coined until 1998. "Open source" misses the point of free software; it supports the four freedoms for convenience and technical advantages, but the ideology accomodates proprieatry components. It is silent on freedom in the social sense.
Linus Torvalds would eventually embrace open source.
Say "GNU/Linux" instead of "Linux": it is fairer and more accurate. Without the irreplaceable software contributed by the GNU project − and even more importantly, the founding ideas of freedom − the system most mistakenly call "Linux" would not exist. It's that simple.
Magic Banana
I believe you got ME a bit confuse, Please follow me on this, and If I'm wrong feel free to comment.
crunchBang is a Debian GNU/Linux based distribution offering a great blend of speed, style and substance. Using the nimble Openbox window manager, it is highly customisable and provides a modern, full-featured GNU/Linux system without sacrificing performance.
The primary aim of the CrunchBang project is to produce a stable distribution offering the best possible out-of-the-box Openbox experience. To achieve this goal, CrunchBang pulls many base packages directly from Debian's repositories, which are well-known for providing stable and secure software. Packages from CrunchBang's own repositories are then customised and pinned to the system to produce what is known as the CrunchBang distro.
Crunchbang is a Debian GNU/Linux with proprietary drivers not sponsor by FSF
Do I stand corrected.?
I believe you are correct. My point is that there is more GNU than Linux in CrunchBang (as in most operating systems with the Linux kernel, Android being a significant exception); not that there is no proprietary software in CrunchBang. There is.
Magic....You are so right...arrgghhh, one of these days, I will get that Linux habit out of my head and only say GNU/Linux....or better yet just GNU.
You wouldn't want to just say "GNU" like "Trisquel GNU", because that doesn't give the Linux kernel the credit it deserves.
"GNU/Linux" is the best we can do, for now.
The best option is to get the Hurd running well so we can damn this naming problem forever. :p
Well this might be good news for the Crunchbang community....It appears Blag 21K (http://blagblagblag.org/) will use Openbox as their default WM. Various DE's will be available during install (XFCE, LXDE, Mate, Gnome), however, if the DE is left unchecked then it will install an optimized Openbox session by default.
This could be a good replacement for Crunchbang.