Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more

Just because it has a funny name, doesn't mean it's a joke. They seem to have ISOs for download on their site..

> The users of gNuSense Linux will be completely free from the pain of modern computing. Good work FSF!

Just because you don't agree with an entirely reasonable viewpoint (that putting unauditable/unethical binary blobs in your kernel is bad), doesn't mean you should ridicule it as being obviously incorrect. My wireless and graphics cards don't require binary blobs.

If it's a joke, they've gone to great lengths to fool people. There's various websites with content, screenshots, downloads, ISOs... I think they're serious.

Not that I don't like the general idea of a free-free distribution. It's just not very realistic, because I for one would like to actually use my computer, and I can imagine others wanting to do the same. With their computers, though. :P

Their first obvious hint for a fake is this: "where the user has access to all the sources for all software on the system". Simply because such a distribution already exists: Debian. Debian has no binary-only graphics drivers, no driver packs for ndiswrapper, and even no binary-only firmware. You can get every piece of source code directly from the Debian servers.
Of course you're free to add any binary stuff from 3rd party sites yourself, if you're willing to take the risk.

Personally I prefer my graphics drivers to be open source and free of root exploits (nvidia anyone?). Yet another example of how Mozilla hates freedom.

> "Yet another example of how Mozilla hates freedom."

ROTFL.... James, be honest - are you President Bush's speech writer ?

This is really strange. There is Debian and Ubuntu (with some install selections) to provide completely free and open source distributions. Both basically sucks if you're an end user with easy to use software. So there should be no reason to make another such distribution. It would be better trying to create free replacements for the things that don't have such yet.
And I really doubt that Nvidia would risk a press scandal by giving away somehow modified binary drivers. The open versions are just slow, so if you want decent accelleration, you have to use the proprietary ones.
Thanks Asa for your POV, it's exactly my opinion. There are some geeks out there, who can and actually want to use such a distribution, but for the broad public it just sucks.

i don't know what's your problem with people liking the software running on their computer to be open.

what's funny here? the "fun" you're having with this (and the fun you've had with debian renaming firefox) is not my kind of fun.

@Tim: You must not have heard about the remote root exploit found in the NVIDIA driver for Linux a few weeks ago. (It's been fixed in the latest release.)

Actually it's real. Crippled I guess, but real.

Chris: I am sure your wireless card and graphics card do make use of binary blobs. However, the binary blobs were probably pre-loaded into flash when you bought the hardware.

Your computer probably uses another binary blob to control the boot process, and your kernel is interpreting binary blobs to perform power management.

Are these binary blobs any worse than firmware images that must be loaded into the hardware by the operating system? Not really -- they're just more visible.

That said, I wouldn't run proprietary nVidia drivers on my system :)

James: As I said and meant, I'm talking about binary blobs in my kernel, such as with nvidia/fglrx or atheros/broadcom/etc wireless drivers under ndiswrapper.

> Are these binary blobs any worse than firmware images that must be loaded into the hardware by the operating system? Not really -- they're just more visible.

They're worse because most of them are violating the Linux authors' copyright, for a start, and because I'm more likely to have my machine compromised by a proprietary blob in my kernel than in my graphics card's ASIC. Finally, they're worse because running a tainted kernel stops me from being a useful member of the kernel community; my bugreports become useless.

I don't really understand why you chose to make such an esoteric "blobs are relative" argument against what I thought was a reasonable and measured response to Asa's unreasonable ridicule.