Re: gnu and linux

[thaths@xxxxxxxxxxxx (Sudhakar Chandrasekharan)]

Ramakrishnan M wrote:
> A better way will be to run the program "vrms".

>From the dselect info about vrms:

"The vrms program will analyze the set of currently-installed packages
on a Debian GNU/Linux system, and report all of the packages from the
non-free tree which are currently installed. "


1. non-free under Debian contains all the software that are not licensed
under a copyright that complies with the Debian Free Software Guidelines
(DFSG: http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines).

2. Artistic License, BSD style license, Modified BSD license, MPL and
MIT License all comply with the DFSG.

3. vrms would treat software distributed under the above listed non-GNU
licenses to be free.

4. Ergo vrms would not measure how much of your system contains non-GNU
licensed software.

5. Considering that you have not provided any other concrete way of
measuring "GNU-ness" of a distributin I maintain my point that counting
klocs (lines of code) is still a decent way of measuring how much of
your system is GNU/Linux and how much of it is BSD/Linux or MIT/Linux.  

6. Counting the number of .deb / .rpm packages is not a valid measure
because some packages are huge (emacs, for example) while others are
miniscule (imaptool whose Debian package is maintained by yours truly).

This is my last post to this thread in ILUG-C.  I shall make all future
arguments in this thread through personal email.

Thaths
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