On Sat, Mar 21, 2015 at 07:09:50PM +0200, Lars Noodén wrote:
> On 21.03.2015 18:51, Linuxito wrote:
> > Great reading. I knew RMS would answer something like that to that
> > question, if it's licensed under GPL, it's free software, period.
>
> ( Actually it's LGPL [1] but ... )
>
> I expect that he is thinking about it and will be thinking about it a
> while longer before he comes up with a formal position on this
> particular piece of nastiness. On the issues of "tivoization" and
> proprietary javascript he was able to come up with something. Here the
> situation is not much different, but the method being (ab)used is
> obfuscation. The code base is so overwhelmingly massive, convoluted,
> uncommented, and undocumented that it is very effectively obfuscated and
> closed. For all the other bad things that systemd does, it violates the
> spirit of the GPL on two levels: freedom 0 and freedom 1.
>
> - the hard dependencies prevent programs from being run as one wishes
> - the obfuscated code prevents studying and changing, for nearly all
>

Well, we might all agree on despising the systemd-nonsense on a
technical level, but nobody can say it's not free software without
being considered a fool. The systemd-nonsense is distributed with a
free software license, therefore it *is* free software. Anybody can
use, distribute, modify and redistribute modified versions of the
systemd-nonsense, so all the four essential freedoms of the definition
of Free Software are guaranteed. Fullstop. The case of tivo is
*extremely* and *fundamentally* different, so please just let's try
avoiding mixing up oil and water, since we can't succeed, and produces
only confusion and endless discussions.

The answer of RMS is quite normal and expected: he is devoted his
entire life to the fight for software freedom, and the
systemd-nonsense is a free (nonsense) software, so what kind of
opinion do you expect from him? After all, nobody has *forced* all the
distibutions to adopt the systemd-nonsense, and nobody could. It was a
*free* choice, even if we agree that it has probably been a stupid
one, and it can virtually be reverted at any time (and this is what
Devuan is actually trying to do).

What is strange in the report made by Jaromil is the fact that just
asking a question about the systemd-nonsense classifies you as a
troll, which is quite unusual in the free software community.

Let's keep calm, and avoid fuss.

HND

KatolaZ

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