LibrePlanet talk: Mission Statement/Draft
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The mission statement is an important document that ultimately affects Libre Planet's ability to achieve a free software society. If anything is unclear to you, missing, or you think should be removed, please say so here.
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Fully-Free Operating Systems
The mission statement says that "groups should only promote operating system distributions that are on the list of fully free distributions". I would ordinarily agree with this idea based on ethical principles. But what should be demonstrated to the average person when using free software is dependent on a single proprietary component, like a binary kernel module (or even a proprietary BIOS as is virtually always the case). I'm not condoning proprietary software, nor am I promoting operating systems with extra proprietary software (such as applications) that isn't necessary for minimum function. As much as I value our ideals, the average person will not simply throw away hardware without having at least the chance to experience free software with the hardware they already have. At the bare minimum, requiring so would endager our ethical appeal. For instance, in some cases Ubuntu (which contains no proprietary applications out-of-the-box) must be used instead of gNewSense because the computer relies on the binary kernel modules included with Ubuntu to boot up. To a lesser extent (because it's not complete core functionality), the same holds true for binary firmware in one's wireless card. I understand why we wouldn't want to promote proprietary operating systems, no matter how little of the system is actually proprietary. But we shouldn't stab ourselves in the foot by alienating ourselves from people who might turn out to be interested in free software, its ethics, and its ideals. --Daradib 22:59, 26 May 2009 (UTC)
