Why Source Mage GNU/Linux is not in FSF distributions list?

4 respostas [Última entrada]
vita_cell
Desconectado
Joined: 07/19/2015

http://sourcemage.org/

Here, the social contract:
http://sourcemage.org/Social%20Contract

Looks like the distro is old (2003?), but still maintained and in development.

jxself
Desconectado
Joined: 09/13/2010

Probably the maintainers have never asked. That is the first step. The FSF only offers endorsement to distros that want it so if they don't want it then nothing happens.

My initial research shows that this distro would not qualify as-is even if they did ask. Given that changes would be needed then it's even more important for the distro maintainers to be involved in this with FSF. Assuming that they even want an endorsement in the first place. My take is that they probably are not interested though.

vita_cell
Desconectado
Joined: 07/19/2015

Yes, the most likely thing is that they never asked for endorsement. But by their social contract, they could be in that distros list.

andyprough
Desconectado
Joined: 02/12/2015

Did you look through their testing branch, which appears to be where their current stuff is? http://mirror.sobukus.de/files/sourcemage/codex/test/

Looked ok to me at a glance. I can't understand what they are doing with the kernel though - are they just building a vanilla kernel?

I see that they used to offer to install Google Chrome, but I'm assuming that's not current from the installation scripts I was reading. They have a "rejected" section where they put stuff like Nvidia firmware and opera and vivaldi: http://mirror.sobukus.de/files/sourcemage/codex/z-rejected/

jxself
Desconectado
Joined: 09/13/2010

"Yes, the most likely thing is that they never asked for endorsement. But by their social contract, they could be in that distros list."

Um, no. That's just words = in the end it doesn't mean anything because, regardless of what they say, their actions are to have quite a bit of software that is nonfree in and of itself as well as additional software that has no other purpose but to run nonfree software (e.g., NDISwrapper to run nonfree Windows XP network device drivers.)

I only did a quick search to determine if it could be a feasible candidate and was able to determine very quickly that it's not. They don't seem to *want* endorsement so it doesn't matter anyway. And, while a sufficiently interested person could inventory 100% of everything and determine exactly how many nonfree programs can dance on the head of a pin, the outcome of not meeting the FSDG criteria would be the same.