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To paraphrase what GNU has said : We must not judge all of a person by just part of what they do.

I thought he was the founder (and main funder) of Ubuntu and Canonical.

He is and he has also repeatedly praised the Free Software philosophy and DOES support efforts regarding the same.

http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki

I, for one, don't use Ubuntu anymore, don't recommend it any more until they fix these issues

that's your freedom to choose.

http://fci.wikia.com/wiki/User:Pravs/What_Ubuntu_should_do_to_regain_my_conf...

here how i reply to that :

- It does not give credit to the GNU project.

Try searching for GNU on their website you DO get references to Ubuntu GNU/Linux, Kubuntu GNU/Linux

- It does not give importance to Freedom.

what exactly are you referring to here? Yes their primary goal is giving GNU/Linux to the masses and yes they do make freedom secondary. Only making freedom secondary does NOT imply that they ignore it all together. You cannot compare them to a M$.

- "Ubuntu is and always will be free of charge." there is no guarantee that it will remain Free Software

After the M$ Novell deal and a not fully ready GPL v3 yet, how many projects can guarantee that they will remain Free Software?

- On the contrary, they have clearly stated their willingness to include non-free softwares in their distribution.

They do include proprietary drivers so new users can use the system, but other than that what other non free software are they packaging into Ubuntu?

- They don't believe in Free Software. Free Software is only for software which other people develop (Launchpad is non-free software), we will have a commercial advantage in keeping launchpad proprietary, we might release it if we can't make much money out of it. If you want to contribute to Ubuntu you will have to use a non-free software which stores your data in a proprietary format.

Is this your opinion or did a Canonical/Ubuntu representative say this? If yes please do give that link as well.

- Ubuntu translations does not respect upstream, they are forks. The Rosetta translations don't go upstream (It is good in one way since the quality of the translations are very poor)Again, do you have a web link that states this? Also, didn't you say your concern was Ubuntu's ``lack of respect of freedom/GNU" and not their software quality. If that was true why are you mentioning this point at all?

So for me gNewSense, Debian, Fedora ... are much more important than Ubuntu (but again it is better than Windows, Suse ...).

As a Debian user myself, i would rather give Debian to someone wanting to to startup with GNU/Linux, however i don't want them to break their heads on building drivers in their 1st attempt at install. Nor do i want to restrict them by saying it will work only if you have this hardware it works else it won't - in fact that gives them the impression that it is me that is conditioning their freedom :-)

Freedom aspect is not the top priority for Ubuntu (Ubuntu website highlights Free of Cost availability).

agreed.

...

By the way - has anyone done this so far?

I didn't get it. Did you mean anyone released their distro infrastructure?

no, i meant - has anyone asked Canonical why is Launchpad not Free Software ?

Debian uses only Free Software for its infrastructure and it promises to give back to the community any new tools created.

agreed.

"When we write new components of the Debian system, we will license them in a manner consistent with the Debian Free Software Guidelines." http://www.us.debian.org/social_contract

agreed and respected.

see the wiki link. It is not just launchpad, the entire data stored in the infrastructure is in proprietary format (Remember the case of bitkeeper).

Well, at the end of the day it got dumped for git and if all you say is true for launchpad it won't last very long either.

And Ubuntu does not give credit to the GNU project.

Try searching for GNU on their website you DO get references to Ubuntu GNU/Linux, Kubuntu GNU/Linux.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/linux-gnu-freedom.html

agreed.

So for me Ubuntu is down the list of Free Software distributions and I would support all distributions that gives Freedom more importance than ease of use/technical merit.

i would rather give Debian to someone over any other distro ANY day, only one can't do that all the time. If everyone i met was a techie and willing to go the extra mile - yes it works, only life isn't always like that. The normal non techie user DOES count.

Sometimes it not so bad if you hold a child's hand while it is learning to walk :-)

You will have to use a non-free program to participate in ubuntu development and your contributions will be stored in a proprietary format, you could retrieve it only through that program (remember bitkeeper).

i do and i also remember how it was chucked out and replaced by git.

Again I have no personal hatred against Mark Shuttleworth.

i never said so :-)

He has done a wonderful job in getting GNU/Linux to masses and he is a great speaker and amazingly good at convincing people.

agreed.

But that doesn't mean I have to agree to everything he does.

absolute agreement :-)

Regards,

- vihan