I tried posting this last night, but the forum has a bug that doesn't let you login from posting a comment--It asks for your password,but tosses your comments! ouch!

back on topic!

If you read thru the posts, you'll see that the KDE people wanted a special version of "Knoppix KDE" to pass out at a show to prospective software writers to use KDE. They were upset to find that Knoppix had free but non-GNU stuff added to it.

The backstory is that RMS spent so much time over the last years beating them into GPL goodness that they wanted a 100% OSS disc. Klaus' vison of Knoppix is to cram as much as he can on it for maximum utility, as long as the disc is freely copyable & redistributable for everyone who gets a disc. The fact that things like drivers, fonts, etc are free to download, but not "Open Source" isn't really an issue.

The KDE people really wanted a "Knoppix" branded disc to show off.. because it's getting a lot of buzz lately [and rightfully so!] That's really the only thing that made a stink here. Whoever was putting it together didn't want to brand it "Knoppix" but strip out all the non-OSS stuff just to appease them. The little bits of drivers are what makes Knoppix "just work" so well versus being straight Debian. They didn't feel it would be in their interest [or ours either] to have a bunch of people with "crippled" discs out there a. blasting the forums to find out what's wrong, & b. giving "Knoppix" a bad name because stuff didn't work like it did for other people. Klaus can't support any forks--even to satisfy the GNU people. His work is GPL'd so they can use it, no hard feelings, but if they want to be that strict about the "free" stuff they'll have to go elsewhere and not call it "knoppix".

My solution to the KDE people would be to use Morphix instead. Morphix gives credit to Knoppix and is a system to build discs rather than support for 1 specific disc. Then they could also create a seperate module with all the "missing" stuff rolled up for people to download seperately. While they were at it, they could have a set of modules made to cover the whole functions of offices, mail/web/DB servers, desktop, firewall...all that could be in seperate Morphix modules to show people how far GNU/Linux has really come.