2006/11/3, Harshal Vaidya harshalx@gmail.com:
Ive never been able to understand what people get by coming up with million different form of free distributions.What was wrong with Debian or Ubuntu that these people thought of making a new one.
Just saw this review by Mark Pilgrim (Dive into Python author) about gNewSense and I thought it would be interesting. In his post he tries to explain why he thinks gNewSense is important and he calls it a reference implementation of software freedom.
"There's a new GNU/Linux distribution, gNewSense http://www.gnewsense.org/, so of course there had to be a Digg thread full of people complaining that the world doesn't need another GNU/Linux distributionhttp://www.digg.com/linux_unix/FSF_debuts_fully_free_Ubuntu_Debian_variant. I would argue the opposite: this is one distribution that the world absolutely *does* need. (It may need others too, that's not part of this argument.)"
..... "The gNewSense maintainers apparently feel that saying you're "a little bit non-free" is akin to saying you're "a little bit pregnant." Close doesn't count, and even if people don't notice the difference today, they'll definitely notice it nine months from now."
.....
"This is why I say that gNewSense is the one distribution that the world actually needs: it's like a reference implementationhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_implementation_%28computing%29for Free Software."
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/11/06/gnewsense
Cheers Praveen