>Richard felt that this "ports tree" of ours made OpenBSD non-free. He came to our mailing lists and lectured to us specifically, yet he said nothing to the many other vendors who do the same; many of them donate to the FSF and perhaps that has something to do with it.
Stallman and the FSF apply the same standard everywhere. He rejects Red Hat (a major GNU sponsor) as "non-free" just like OpenBSD, in contrast to what the BSD guys claim.
>Richard has personally made sure that all the official GNU software -- including Emacs -- compiles and runs on Windows.
What?! Most official GNU software does NOT run on Windows.
">Richard felt that this "ports tree" of ours made OpenBSD non-free. He came to our mailing lists and lectured to us specifically"
to complement this story a little. rms had heard from one source or another that OpenBSD was "completely free" too (probably based on their hard and much appreciated work on wifi drivers and blobs), and looked into the matter to see if it could be included in the list of FSF endorsed operating systems (which thus far have only GNU/Linux systems).
He found references to non-free software in the ports tree and wrote to the openbsd mailing list to ask for clarifications.
There were actually a few saner voices who politely stated that was the intent and that OpenBSD as a project had a different definition of "free" and as such should not be included in the officially endorsed FSF-list.
Of course, for the less stable elements, it was a good pretext to scoff and insult the the man. Some even riled on and created a song about it. OpenBSD is a fine operating system, but for a normal person the culture around it can be quiteoffputting.
>Richard felt that this "ports tree" of ours made OpenBSD non-free. He came to our mailing lists and lectured to us specifically, yet he said nothing to the many other vendors who do the same; many of them donate to the FSF and perhaps that has something to do with it.
See here for example: http://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html
Stallman and the FSF apply the same standard everywhere. He rejects Red Hat (a major GNU sponsor) as "non-free" just like OpenBSD, in contrast to what the BSD guys claim.
>Richard has personally made sure that all the official GNU software -- including Emacs -- compiles and runs on Windows.
What?! Most official GNU software does NOT run on Windows.