[ubuntu-us-ma] Ubuntu's Marketing Materials

[Martin Owens]

Hey Daniel,

The Free Software debate is a long one. There is a thinking amongst both
developers who want to serve users honestly and users who have been
treated badly in the past, that we needed a way of identifying the
rights and privileges that any user of software ort to have as a matter
of the normal set of freedoms we each have in any other area of life.

Because of computers and software are new to humanity, it's taken us
forty years to go from anarchistic freedom to over-controlled monopolies
to a more open market with legal frameworks. Free Software (and the FSF)
were critical is finding out what was missing and filling in all the
legal and philosophical foundations which would move us, not backwards
towards anarchism, but forwards towards freedom with fairness.

Linux and many other software projects owe the FSF and the philosophies
there in a great deal. These projects require the structures and
foundations laid down by the ideas and principles of people who didn't
think it was good enough to be just practical for ones own benefit.

Now we've been doing a delicate dance for ten years trying to move the
established order over to this new system, trying to make exceptions,
bend the rules and fitting the pieces of the puzzle together by hook and
crook. Trying to make sure that Free Software is Free, useful and
economical.

New users misunderstand why we would put non-free pieces into our
systems. Some think that practicality is the only function and that
social responsibility is simply not needed. I think differently. We keep
track of all the pieces that we need for functionality, but work hard to
replace them all the time. This is not fundamentalism, it's simply that
this software is disrespectful. It isn't a civil member of the software
world and despite having to use it to make computers work, we don't
invite it round for tea and support it's campaign to be elected as the
normal method of software production.

But once in, it's hard to remember why we should spend any time
replacing it or even if any work needs doing. Projects like Trisqual
honor the Ubuntu community by showing us directly what work we need to
still do in order to civilize the last few savage packages and drivers.
They are our brother who's uncompromising ideology and courageous
functional sacrifice is helpful to our own progression. Even if we,
ourselves need to balance both the need for Freedom and functionality.

And conversely it's important to note how important a practical Ubuntu
is to the FSF and projects like Trisquel. It's just as easy to exclude
users with difficult hardware or complex needs and reduce the size of
the community as it is to thoughtlessly add propritary components into
the system. We offer the FSF a perspective on overcoming niggles and
bumps and a push towards inviting ever more practical people into
becoming just a little more concerned with Free Software without having
to throw their computer away first.

Hope this helps understanding why Ubuntu is a Freedom project and
Triqual is a software project.

Martin

On Tue, 2012-03-20 at 00:09 -0400, Daniel Hollocher wrote:
> Since Trisquel is "fsf free" free software, so it must distance itself
> from the Ubuntu brand as much as it can.  I believe that presents some
> sort of marketing conflict.
> 
> I was looking at the Trisquel website to double check my opinions a
> little bit, and reading a little bit of about gnu, and I realized that
> I really don't like gnu.  Weird, petty, religous; I don't know how to
> describe my feeling.  "linux" seems like a reference to a software
> project, where as "gnu/linux" seems like a reference to a philosophy
> project. /rambling