How does Trisquel get around the Ubuntu package licensing?

Yeah, they are compiled from source (afaik).

At a glance the problem seems to be trademarks and binary-only (Hence non-free) packages. Trisquel replaces Ubuntu branding with its own (though there may be some non-rebranded packages left, see the bug tracker), so that's not a problem. Also, Trisquel includes only free software, which implies that it distributes only software that anyone[1] has the right to distribute. For programs for which this isn't the case, they're simply not distributed in Trisquel. [Begin edit] Compiling packages from source or using binaries has nothing to do with this. [End edit]

The web pages you linked are written from the open source perspective, which isn't the same as the free software philosophy. It fails to acknowledge the ethical problem and hence it's ethically inferior to the free software philosophy. Note that most but not all open source software is also free software.

While these open source supporters worry that Cannonical will begin enforcing their proprietary licenses (That is it, they worry about having to pay money); free software supporters generally *act* on the problem by outright avoiding proprietary software, so that no company can come to them and threaten the right to distribute the software they use, including Cannonical.

Open source supporters generally have the attitude that the more popular system, the better. They generally don't care about the ethics of software and they're glad when somebody builds a GNU/Linux distribution with the mere goal of distributing software which will serve the user only superficially but in truth it's entirely made for the developer's benefit (Software that is proprietary, has digital restrictions management, etc...) such as “SteamOS”. I think that that's an absurd viewpoint, but that's the viewpoint of the author of the first web page you linked, as he clearly states near the end of the post.

Software must server its user, and nobody should be able to do business developing or distributing software or a physical product that doesn't primarily serve the user, but the lack of ethics of some people combined with the indolence of the rest (And not capitalism or companies, in my opinion) has put the society in the situation where that's commonplace. Games which the user is prevented from distributing or changing, under legal threat, means that he is subject to the developer's whim, as he can't adapt the game to his taste, fix errors, or rely on the community to do it. Since not even the most productive programmer does more than all the other developers of the software he uses combined, relying on the community improvement is as important for programmers as for non-programmers.

[1]: For some Copyleft licenses like the GNU GPL, users who violate the license may lose the right to use the software. This is intended as a mean of deterrent to people who would like to abuse free software to make proprietary software derived from it. See the section “Termination” of the GNU GPL 3 for details for that particular example.

Changelog: Added text marked with human readable square brace tags.