Re: OpenToken

[Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org>]

Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org> writes:

> On Aug 30, 12:51 am, Stephen Leake <stephen_le...@stephe-leake.org>
> wrote:
>>
>> I actually have two slightly different versions of OpenToken; one for
>> GDS (my work project) and one for webcheck (a home project). I've been
>> waiting for an excuse to merge them; this could be it.
>
> Great news. In fact, since OpenToken seems dead upstream, you might as
> well adopt it for your own and host it on a public revision control
> system. Ada-France's monotone server is yours if you want it;
> otherwise you can go to SourceForge, Gna!, Berlios, Tigris or
> Savannah.

What are the tradeoffs between doing that, and becoming a Debian
maintainer for OpenToken? or both?

I'm familiar with SourceForge, and monotone, and I have a small public
website of my own. So it's not the mechanics of the public site I'm
concerned about. More the time it takes to respond to user queries.

I guess it depends on how popular the package becomes. Both public
sites and Debian packages are practically invisible without concerted
advertising campaigns, so I suspect there's not much difference.

I'm inclined to start with being a Debian maintainer, and only
establish a public website if there is more demand.

>> That's about to change; I'm finally fed up with Windows at home, so
>> I'm buying a new laptop with gNewSense (derived from Debian) on it.
>
> Congratulations. I hope you enjoy the experience. Out of curiosity,
> what is the difference between gNewSense and using only the main part
> of Debian (as opposed to contrib and non-free)?

Partly ignorance, partly politics. 

I chose gNewSense because it is advertised as 100% Free Software (in
the GPL sense). For example, the wireless card won't work in the
laptop I'm getting, because there is no Free Software driver for it.

FSF established gNewSense because the main part of Debian is not 100%
free in this sense; see http://www.gnewsense.org/Main/Features.

The politics is supporting a laptop/Gnu/Linux vendor that offers
gNewSense; I hope that promotes the cause of 100% Free Software in
some way - they can report one more customer interested in it. In
fact, they did say they are working on a 100% free wireless solution.

I'm hoping I can just use Debian apt-get to get updates, but I'm not
clear that will filter the stuff removed by gNewSense.

Eventually, I'd like to get a Free Software BIOS. That may be the only
way to avoid DRM, if the DRM advocates get their way. The book
Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge presents a scary vision of such a thing;
you can't even order a pizza without a trust certificate, and Gnu Hurd
is illegal, but the choice of hackers. No mention of Debian :).

Explicitly supporting gNewSense is one way to encourage Free Software
BIOS development. At least I tell myself that :).

-- 
-- Stephe