On Fri, 2015-03-27 at 16:37 +0100, Didier Kryn wrote:

>      Hi John,

>

>      When I wrote anti-freedom, I considered a stricter definition of 
> freedom than GPL, beyond free access to the source and gratuitous 
> redistribution, including e.g. the absence of technical lock-in. I won't 
> argue about words though; it wouldn't be constructive. One way to 
> prevent the corruption mechanism you describe is to spell out what you 
> say we didn't: that "we are building a POSIX/UNIX/GNU sort of thing".

Trying to take the high moral ground and claim to be shooting for a
stricter freedom is what leads to RMS and Debian unable to agree on
which is the more 'Free.' Debian rejecting the FSF's GNU FDL and RMS
rejecting the easy availability of the non-free repos, blobs, etc. and
all of the eyerolling that entails amongst us normal folk outside the
priesthood.

I was trying for a more practical line of division. To say, whatever
guys, so systemd is Free Software; but that doesn't mean we have to like
it. Which is likely to be important sooner than many think. Many of us
were blindsided by systemd but I have started taking Pottering & the
other Mad Hatters very serious now.

Their failure to stabilize btrfs is the only reason they haven't moved
on to the next phase of systemd/linux, gutting the distros and turning
every user space program into an app in a container. Once that is done
the apps don't really care what stub distro is hosting them and they can
be delivered from a central Store instead of being built, packaged,
maintained and curated by distros. Do we want to follow? It probably
isn't wise to assume they will never make btrfs work, at best we lucked
out and have gained a year or so of time before it starts showing up in
Fedora. Now is the time to ask that question instead of when Debian is
forced to follow RedHat again. Because Gimp the App is still going to
be just as 'Free' as Gimp the package. Or at least it will be until you
must get it from the Store with ads, nags, in-app purchase of closed
source 'premium' filters, etc. But by that final phase it will be far
too late to turn back.

We haven't needed to run every user program in a hardened jail and a
good argument can be made that the primary reason to do so is because
you want to let in a lot of untrustworthy software that should be run in
a secure container. See Android/Linux for what sort of dystopia the
worst case scenario looks like. Over there, Linux installers are
Shareware. All of them. I'm not a priest of St. Ignucius but the idea
of the return of Shareware gives me the willies and is a future I do.
not. want.