rolling your own distro and the GPL (Re: [clue-talk] North Topic Track)

[Collins Richey]

On 7/31/06, Nate Duehr <nate at natetech.com> wrote:
> Brian Gibson wrote:
>
> > Monday's meeting was cool to see how easy it is to
> > roll your own LiveCD.  How hard would it be to extend
> > that to rolling a new distro?  For example, take
> > SkoleLinux as a base and customize it for SOHO.
>
> The biggest problem with rolling your own distro right now is that if
> you base it off of someone else's distro, the FSF no longer considers
> pointing upstream to "base" source packages appropriate.  You have to
> maintain your own source packages for everything.  (Well technically you
> always did, but now they're sending out letters.)
>
> LOTS of distros are caught in this mess, but FSF seems hell bent on
> chasing down MEPIS for it first.
>
> The MEPIS creator has always said "my distro builds off of Debian,
> here's the changes" but that's not considered "good enough" under the
> GPL according to FSF.  He's being gracious about it, but as a complete
> outsider I can laugh and point at FSF's stupidity with little regard for
> what they think of little ol' me.
>
> I read about all this the other day and just started laughing.  Linux
> will NEVER get out of being a play toy with a few very brave companies
> hiring a few serious gurus and using it for "big stuff", at this rate.
> Great hacker distro, still acting too immature to really be used where
> "big iron" Unix distros are really used.

Laughing and crying at the same time. The FSF had good intentions, but
they have become the biggest impediment to the adaptation of FOSS. FSS
== stupidity == arrogance.

-- 
Collins Richey
     If you fill your heart with regrets of yesterday and the worries
     of tomorrow, you have no today to be thankful for.