High Priority Free Software Projects

I read that gNewSense removed GLX and Mesa from their distro due to being "unfree". This means that 3D OpenGL acceleration is impossible; therefore any 3D games and applications that target OpenGL are impossible as well.

http://wiki.gnewsense.org/Main/Broken3dApps

Unbelievable.

blowdart said:

What's interesting is how many of them are "Free replacement for X".

Where's the innovation?

That's exactly the point I was going to make!  gnash was the one that stood out to me, why just re-code a flash player.  If free software it truly the way forward, why not try to create something new, that stands out?   The only thing that was vaguely interesting to me (as a programmer) on that list was  reversible debugging in GDB.

Hmmh, why are you so irritated about gNewSense? Oh, I think I know. Because of Stallman and Corona Coder. Well, I think there's plenty of room for gNewSense type of distribution.
Developing Open Source version of Flash player doesn't mean that there is no open source projects to replace Flash.

Erisan said:

Hmmh, why are you so irritated about gNewSense? Oh, I think I know. Because of Stallman and Corona Coder. Well, I think there's plenty of room for gNewSense type of distribution.
Developing Open Source version of Flash player doesn't mean that there is no open source projects to replace Flash.

++ for numbers 8 and 10 (Octave and reversible debugging in GDB).  Octave's a great mathematical tool, and if I had a dollar for every time I've accidentally stepped too far or set my breakpoint past where the actual error was happening, I'd be a rich man.

I'm really excited about seeing this in Visual Studio 2010, although right now I've been spending more of my time in XCode, which uses GDB under the hood as its debugger.

Erisan said:

Hmmh, why are you so irritated about gNewSense? Oh, I think I know. Because of Stallman and Corona Coder. Well, I think there's plenty of room for gNewSense type of distribution.
Developing Open Source version of Flash player doesn't mean that there is no open source projects to replace Flash.

I just love how the gNewSense wiki pages use Verdana 

PaoloM said:

Erisan said:

*snip*

I just love how the gNewSense wiki pages use Verdana 

Yep, it's pretty funny

Littleguru wrote: "That's interesting. I wonder how this will help people to adopt free software. Are they really using it if they can't run their stuff on it anymore? But I guess there is 10 kind of people: one who use computers as tools and the others who see it as their new religion."

Heh, there's many different kinds of people. Some doesn't see anything good what Apple/Google/Stallman/FSF does (yes, there's couple of them on C9 too).

Hopefully people's religious hate toward GNU/GPL/FSF/Stallman doesn't affect their opinion of many great GNU softwares.

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Btw. is it possible to reply multiple messages in one post ?

Erisan said:

PaoloM said:

*snip*

Yep, it's pretty funny

Littleguru wrote: "That's interesting. I wonder how this will help people to adopt free software. Are they really using it if they can't run their stuff on it anymore? But I guess there is 10 kind of people: one who use computers as tools and the others who see it as their new religion."

Heh, there's many different kinds of people. Some doesn't see anything good what Apple/Google/Stallman/FSF does (yes, there's couple of them on C9 too).

Hopefully people's religious hate toward GNU/GPL/FSF/Stallman doesn't affect their opinion of many great GNU softwares.

-----
Btw. is it possible to reply multiple messages in one post ?

Well gNewSense could be very useful even if you don't support software freedom. Like for instance if you want to test hardware for general Linux compatibility, it is the best choice for this task because it's one of the few distros which guarantee a non-tainted vanilla kernel.

Ion Todirel said:

gNewSense? huh? whoa, wait a minute, wasn't Linux supposed to be the free and open operating system, isn't all the software distributed with it free?

Nope. You can very easily distribute non-free software with a Linux distribution. Ubuntu for instance comes with non-free drivers, and makes it fairly easy to download non-free software. You can even charge money for it, like Red Hat does from their Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

littleguru said:

Bass said:

*snip*

I'm curious: What does gnusense do to avoid that? Is there something in place that doesn't allow you to install the drivers that I downloaded from the ATI website?

I don't use it, so I don't know for sure.

It's certainly possible, since the kernel can literally sense that proprietary drivers or drivers without a compact license agreement are trying to interface with it. If there isn't already a kernel switch for this, it would be pretty trivial to code something in that denies non-FOSS drivers from working, and this AMD proprietary driver wouldn't work.

littleguru said:

Bass said:

*snip*

I'm curious: What does gnusense do to avoid that? Is there something in place that doesn't allow you to install the drivers that I downloaded from the ATI website?

Even for software, it's somewhat possible to enforce only FOSS software from being installed. There is a package called "vrms" (Virtual Richard Stallman!!) which is basically like a virus scanner but instead for scanning for viruses it scans for non-free software.