[GNU-linux-libre] Introducing ConnochaetOS

[Henry Jensen]

Hello,

I am Henry, a 40 year old computer engineer from Germany. I am using free 
software since 1999 and created
the "DeLi GNU/Linux" distribution in 2002.

Altough the last release of DeLi is more than 2 years old there is still an 
active community. So we, a small team,
decided to create a successor project, this time as entirely free software.

ConnochaetOS will be a free operating system for the desktop with old computers 
in mind but with modern software. 
The name ConnochaetOS derives from "Connochaetes", the scientific name for 
"Gnu". ConnochaetOS will 
contain only free software, according to the GNU Guidelines for Free System 
Distributions. We aim for minimal hardware requirements, as low as a Pentium I 
processor and 64 MB RAM for a graphical desktop.

The web site will be at http://www.connochaetos.org

As usual with such projects we are searching for any help and resources for 
hosting.

We are still in the early stages of development, and right now I am 
constructing a build system, which brings me
to some practical questions regarding some packages. The "Software Blacklist" 
at 
http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Software_blacklist didn't list this software, but I 
have some concerns about them.


netpbm
======
The site http://netpbm.alioth.debian.org/ states
"The upstream source is split into two to allow Debian packaging - some of it 
is free and some goes into non-free. Some of the upstream source files cannot 
be redistributed at all, as there is no license associated with them. "

At least hpcdtoppm seems to be non-free, but this program doesn't seemed to be 
included any longer in the source tarball of various distros, instead a 
replacement script was added, stating that hpcdtoppm ist not included any more.

I just wonder if there may be other problems with netpbm, since Debian still 
has its "netpbm-free" but other distros
include "standard" netpbm, including free distros (I confirmed that for BLAG).

psutils
=======
The license states:

"The included files, md68_0.ps and md71_0.ps (and their uuencoded forms) are
(to the best of my knowledge) copyright Apple Computer, Inc."

The mentioned files are without license and copyright notice. Can I disribute 
them with peace of conscience?

Additionally I was astonished that there is still an issue with ghostscript, 
according to
http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Software_blacklist#GLP_Ghostscript_CMap_data_files

Then I found out that BLAG ships the non-free files in question, they are even 
hosted on an FSF server, check 
ftp://blag.fsf.org/90000/en/os/i386/BLAG/RPMS.fedora/ghostscript-8.63-1.fc9.i386.rpm.
 Maybe someone can inform
the BLAG people or maybe they are reading this list.

Kind regards,

Henry