[Dev] [GNU-linux-libre] [Riley Baird] LibertyBSD - OpenBSD minus the blobs

Isaac David Reyes González isacdaavid at gmail.com
Tue Dec 30 03:13:27 GMT 2014


"Better" is very broad. Most people in these lists would see the GPL as an
advantage, but none would deny that Clang or LLVM are essentially free and
compatible (maybe after some proofreading work) with the FSF's Free System
Distribution Guidelines. As much as I prefer GCC and the GNU GPL in
general, I wouldn't like to see precious efforts going to porting your
OpenBSD spinoff back to GCC before actually making it a wholly free system.
Not that I'm going to tell you how to spend your time, but getting a wholly
free BSD is obviously the real issue here.

To be honest I like the idea of staying as close as possible to upstream
OpenBSD while also meeting the FSF standards, so OpenBSD users feel
attracted to make the jump. I think this was your original intention. If
manpower is scarce, ask no more and keep Clang (assuming it doesn't need
further liberation-wise tuning). There are some points that I would like to
ask though, because your emails and website didn't clarify them for me:

How do we know beforehand that LibertyBSD is actually compliant with the
FSDG? Why are you so confident that it will make it to the FSF list? Don't
get me wrong, I don't underestimate your work and knowledge but I'm afraid
that my donation might go to a dead end. I think going a bit more technical
about what you are deblobbing and how you achieve it helps.

Assuming some trusted third party reviews your work and confirms it is
libre, how will LibertyBSD be maintained? I look at all the work that
Parabola hackers for instance undergo in order to clean up a GNU/Linux
distro that is allegedly easy to clean, and I tell myself "Hell, this is
though". Have you considered building a community? Some organisation like
the FSF might want to help you complete the crowdfunding, but then what?

On Mon, Dec 29, 2014 at 2:45 PM, Riley Baird <orthogonal at librewrt.org>
wrote:

> On 30/12/14 07:20, Luke Shumaker wrote:
> > At Sun, 28 Dec 2014 20:45:12 -0800,
> > Ali Abdul Ghani wrote:
> >> welcome
> >> This delightful News
> >> I have some suggestions
> >>
> >> - Replace clang to gcc
> >
> > Well, it's based on OpenBSD, which uses clang or gcc based on the
> > architecture (as clang does not support all of the architectures that
> > OpenBSD does).  Further, the switch to clang was pretty recent.  Using
> > GCC probably would be pretty easy.
> >
> > (to those on the gnu-linux-libre list: the original email was
> > forwarded to the Parabola dev list, whre a couple of other replies
> > happened)
>
> Is there any significant reason, other than the license, that gcc is
> better than clang? I really don't want to deviate too much from
> upstream, and as long as the license is free, I don't see a problem.
>
> If it's about the license, I can see that OpenBSD's, or Debian's
> decision of which compiler to use would be influential, and thus they
> should use gcc. But LibertyBSD is not likely to be influential, so I
> don't see the point in changing the default compiler.
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