the dfsg isnt a license, its guidelines for inclusion in debian. i believe the fsf now calls their fully free distro guidelines by a similar acronym.

fun fact: the osi open software definition is based on the dfsg. i believe bruce perens wrote the dfsg, he also co-founded osi-- he hoped open source would be a way to promote free software.

about a year later, he stepped down and sent an open letter to the debian mailing lists titled "its time to talk about free software again." my feeling about open source (my disappointment in it) is similar to what perens feels, but he is still involved with it, sometimes being on their board or at least trying to get reelected.

he has also been a debian project leader, possibly the 2nd or 4th but certainly one of the early ones.

https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/1 … 01641.html

this is where what i think about "drawbridges" comes in: https://forums.hyperbola.info/viewtopic.php?id=136

one thing free software advocates can afford to be honest about is that even the fsf is pragmatic sometimes. it made a strategic compromise with the lgpl, which it justifies in an essay where it talks about pragmatism-- and just how easy it is to go too far with it.

im fine with the fsf saying "you can easily go too far with pragmatism" and i think as an organisation theyre very honest and straightforward about it-- more than open source, which tries to look cool by appearing to have fewer rules.

the fsf can actually afford to have fewer rules, while they appear to have more-- because their rules are pretty much all written ones. most of the unwritten rules in free software are misunderstandings about what the fsf wants.

but open source has more unwritten rules-- like the unwritten rule that you have to bash any attempt to talk about freedom, while constantly overreacting to political differences as unnecessary political quibbling (as if those differences were invented by free software, not by open source.)

so i have grown to have very little respect for open source.

that said-- the fsf is pragmatic sometimes, i agree that its very easy to go too far (i dont think the fsf has, though i find their take on turning non-free firmware into anything else by simply making it so you cant do firmware updates a bit troubling, even if it seems logical enough) and either way, open source takes pretty much everything non-free and relabels it "pragmatic" because thats what their corporate masters want.

with all that said--

the fsf enjoys having the authoritative voice on what pragmatic choices are worthwhile, simply because their position has continuously had the most merit. i think that makes perfect sense, even though they do not have a monopoly on the issue.

with their track record, i think people are wise to take their position seriously, but even the pope is considered fallible when hes not on the throne of st. peter. higher up still, even the most perfect and flawless authority in the most orthodox of western beliefs has created ample room for everyone else to screw up sometimes. so i dont think the fsf can have a monopoly on how much pragmatism is "just right," even if they have the first say with the best track record.

in reality, freedom is something everyone is working to push forward on, so the only people who are 100% free in their computing are the ones who own and use zero computers. everyone is pragmatic, a little bit.  and i think just like in orthodoxy, the actual levels of observance vary a little more than people are straightforward about-- whether talking about their own uses, or the positions/practices of the fsf.

it is a much higher standard though, and i think if we dont have a pretty high standard then open source turns it into "anything goes" which is about as pragmatic as saying "well, at least this set of handcuffs is plastic so its much easier to remove."

with open source, there is no serious difference between free and non-free. they present their written rules, they have loads more unwritten rules, which end up rewriting all (and sometimes negating) their written ones. we can all probably do better than that.

credit where credit is due though-- i thought for something with non-free included (and not by default,) debian since 6 was probably the most free of that breed. id even say "only the fully free distros were better" in this regard. is there an exception to this i havent considered yet?

actually, im not counting the incoming-distros page on libreplanet. connochaet os is better than debian in this regard. rms gnu/linux was better than debian in this regard. so i guess:

1. fully free without systemd
2. connochaet os / fully free with systemd
3. debian 6 and 7
4. debian 8 and later
5. debian 5 and previous

but this list is for the sake of argument, and very open to amendments.

note that debian included non-free firmware in 5.0, but didnt have systemd, which means that devuan (with its non-free firmware on the install iso) actually occupies a level equal with 5 on this list.

perhaps 4.5, because it is still easier to remove than it was in debian 5. ive got a script that brings the devuan live iso from the 5 position on this list all the way up to 3.

to go higher, youd need your own repos. gnuinos (not updated recently) takes devuan up to 2 or 1, but rms says the fsf wont add a fully free distro that isnt being actively developed.

my justification for saying its less free if it has systemd is that i still consider systemd to be an eee tactic. assuming this is even possible: free software + eee = less free, at best. i dont think the fsf fully acknowledges that this is possible. like i said, theyre not infallible.

if more people recognised that, they could theoretically work together to make up for the difference. which is of course, something hyperbola is part of.

oh then let me introduce distro-libre, a program that automatically removes systemd in chroot from the trisquel 8 and debian 9.5 live isos: https://notabug.org/figosdev/figos/raw/ … ibre02.fig

you keep feeding me these opportunities and people are going to think i am you, know you, or pay you. at least they should be able to tell on closer inspection that the first one isnt so. the other two are safe to deny since they arent true either. and the latter i couldnt afford, but thank you.

but i agree about the packages! in fact i tried to describe on the trisquel forum three levels of problem for systemd, which i hardly thought were controversial:

1. package level dependency
2. compile (and recompile) level dependency
3. actual (requires writing/rewriting code) dependency

so the first one (even if rare) can be fixed sometimes just by moving from a dep to a recommend. apt doesnt make this easy but it doesnt make it awful for the sake of it. i hope.

maybe people realised this when they changed the defaults from do not include recommended to include recommeded around the time all this shuffling was going on. not necessarily a conspiracy, but it sure seemed dirty and foolish. no love for this move from debian-- but, distro-libre could fix that too.

they also changed (after 10 or 20 years) the way that pinning works, so most in-place pins were rendered inert. that was seriously dirty.

the problem is that arch is just too difficult. i know, i used it years ago and im getting back into it. apt is going to stay more popular, but we should still replace it.

but im in favour of being friendlier than pacman (thats not hard to do, i keep meaning to make a friendlier command-line frontend for it. and i hate using it otherwise) and giving more control than apt.

ive similarly thought of making a frontend for apt that gives you the option of breaking packages if you really want to.

this is another point i made at the trisquel forums. but we were all making that point. more than 6 years ago i asked alex oliva what laptop to get, he recommended a lemote. i got one. but after a year or two i gave it away.

this topic started off as being one that not many people were going to comment on. its extremely specific and also very peripheral to hyperbola (the dfsg relate to a distro that isnt even in the same family.)

but if the op (or admin) complains we can knock it off. i dont think this board is getting used enough, speaking personally i appreciate your participation even if it was (and could sometimes be) a bit rocky at first. (full responsibility for my part in that.)

heres the biggest problem with free software i know-- and im not saying its free softwares fault, and im certainly not saying "gosh, if only the software wasnt free-as-in-freedom"-- im not saying freedom is the cause of this problem, just that this affects free software:

when you have something that fits its own purpose, and solves the problem it sets out to solve, people are very intent on you bending to it-- if pacman doesnt suit your usage at all, people think you should just learn how to use it.

its the "dont reinvent the wheel" argument, but suppose you have giant stone wheels. if your wagon is made of plywood, those wheels wont fit. theyll tear your wagon apart.

when you point this out (not because you expect someone to "get right on that" and make you new wheels, but as justification for looking elsewhere) the prevailing attitude is:

"why dont you just get a better wagon? then you can use our wheels, which are better anyway."

this attitude reached a new plateau with systemd, though you can find it in the freest of the fully free communities. debian has done it, trisquel has done it, and devuan is doing it. to me, its a contradiction. (i can also name a few distros that avoid leaning on this. hyperbola seems very level and down to earth in this regard.)

but getting back to the metaphor, the best wheels in this situation are probably the ones that fit the wagon-- theyre probably wooden and have spokes.

theres nothing stopping anyone here-- including the wagon owner from going elsewhere. its just the prevailing attitude (in general, not necessarily here) that: if your wagon doesnt fit our wheels, you should probably just get a new wagon.

but i could list a slew of arguments in defense of that attitude. its just not reasonable all the time.

my answer of course, is to make hybrid wheels that start with a wooden base layer and incorporate optional stone reinforcements. though i have nothing against either of the other types. i like the stone reinforcement idea because you dont even have to lift the wagon up to make the wheels heavier-duty. you can attach them without removing the wheels you started with.

this metaphor has reached its limit of course, unless the axles were designed in foresight of this upgrade. or you would still have to change those, as well as the bearings. but in the software world, we do crazy stuff like this all the time. indeed, we retrofit unicode to a 7-bit standard used in mostly-analogue teletype machines!

as far as being more flexible than apt, that is the one thing i do recall admiring about pacman, in the days when connochaet os and trisquel were fairly new.

p.s. none of this is a comment on the idea that you should invest in a free-software-supported wifi adapter. its not the same thing as what im saying-- what im talking about is a lot more manageable than writing drivers and firmware for every wifi adapter, or people would have already done that.

we dont benefit from having fewer free drivers, my argument is that the benefits of having fewer software solutions are vastly exaggerated by the relatively few people who really stand to benefit. not to negate the overwhelming nature of choice, which is real-- but everyone wants more choice when they arent happy with the ones they have, they simply dont care if anybody else is happy with whats available to them.

that could stand to change a bit. the easy way is to pay people to care about how happy you are, but sometimes we get more done when we do it for free. if i was getting paid for the things i do for free, id probably be looking for a way out of them a lot sooner.

what, youre unhappy with this software? its free, stop complaining (and giving us valuable data in exchange for our software.)

what youre unhappy with your job? youre getting paid, stop complaining (and giving us valuable data on how to become a company more people want to come work for.)

some of it really is abuse, some of it is thankless and a lot of it even is wrong, but the knee-jerk reactions can also be wrong and they throw away good critiques with the thoughtless ones. thats how reflexes work-- not as careful evaluation but as flinching at anything that comes your way. so we continue to throw away most of the ideas that we could use to improve our software unless we can think up the same critiques on our own (not that we are biased, or anything.)

im very grateful to say once again, there are exceptions. my comment is really on how they are much too rare, while the rest of the potential is just potential, which is not being put to use.