23

Richard Stallman gave an outstanding talk at the University of California on the evening of Feb. 23. I believe the talk will be available in audio form on the Free Software Foundation site at fsf.org. But the reason I bring it up here is because he mentioned gNewSense a couple of times during the course of the talk (once where he mentioned that gNewSense is one of three -- I think he said three -- distros that have fully free software, or words to that effect). This has certainly piqued my interest in gNewSense, and as a newbie-with-portfolio, only having started with GNU/Linux since last month, I'm looking forward to giving gNewSense a test run.

gnewsense and liberated software is as necessary as oxygen and non-nuclear proliferation. Congratulations on a fine effort Brian.

LarryCafiero, it's great to hear from a 'newbie' to the operating system who actually knows it's GNU/Linux and knows and cares about the freedom aspects. I was using 'Linux' for a while before I even heard of an operating system called GNU and found out that it was freedom which started it all. I didn't even know much about what freedom it gave me to start with. I mostly just knew you could get it free as in beer, especially as not many distributions care about freedom, and often include proprietary software so you don't have any. I'm hoping I'll be able to get hold of the recording of that speech.

Also, it's interesting to hear the term 'liberated software' from jahmon. I think that's good in that it obviously refers to freedom, but I think it gives the impression of only referring to software which was previously proprietary (such as Mozilla and OpenOffice.org), rather than software which was written to be free. I read something written by RMS about it once that was along those lines. Personally, I prefer the term 'free software', but I usually write 'free (as in freedom) software' the first time I mention it where I might be misunderstood.

Thanks, guyjohnston, for the kind words and jahmon is right about free software being as necessary as oxygen, etc. I had read some of Stallman's essays on line and until I heard him, I hadn't been converted to the free software movement. But now, count me in.

You are counted....

There's also the term "software freedom" coined by Bradley Kuhn at the FSF. "[I]t's the only unambiguous English term I've ever come up with that describes our community accurately." (see: http://www.linux.com/feature/132573?page=2 for more on this)