dear fellow devs

yesterday and this morning again I had a good chance to talk with
Richard Stallman as he was visiting Amsterdam. It has been very good
to catch up with him about many things more or less related to Devuan
(he is also on the ethical board of our DECODE project, where we are
working also for the micro-service derivative of Devuan).

Of course we talk about Devuan and he did knew already about it.

One interesting conversation we had about manual licensing which is
very relevant to move forward with our pending task. About the
licensing he says that, whatever license we choose (GFDL but can also
be CC) the most important thing is to not repeat the same error that
Debian does: to not rule out manuals licensed with invariant sections.
He told me clearly that the reason why Debian cannot include GNU
manuals is that it does not tolerate any invariant section, not even
the cover. If we tolerate that manuals can have SOME invariant
sections, especially for sections covering ethical aspects rather than
technical ones, then we have a degree of compatibility more than
Debian in the direction of the GNU project and we can include all the
GNU manuals.

I strongly recommend we follow RMS' advice here. And now I'm also
curious about what GNU manuals aren't in Debian, that we can take
advantage of, wondering if the problem also includes some info pages.



Another major thing that RMS told me is that, if we remove the
recommendations for non-free sections in the sources.list on the
website, documentation and those installed, then this is enough of a
condition for Devuan to be 100% free, in addition to the usual cleanup
and linux-libre kernel. He clearly told me that he'd like it to apply
for 100% free and in general to be closer to the GNU project.


As a minor comment when I mentioned about support Hurd he also told me
that he doesn't sees this as a big priority and rather would like to
see efforts in moving Devuan closer to 100% free. Obviously to move in
this direction won't be simple since we include also wifi firmware in
the installer which frankly is veeery useful and comfortable. but...


let me conclude reminding you that in the previous wed meeting we did
talk about including a new linux-libre kernel in the repositories of
Devuan, to make it easy to install. About this task we wanted to ask
parazyd to make a first evaluation of the effort, since he is already
packaging a linux-libre kernel in Heads, which is 100% free.


ciao