Parabola is a GNU/Linux distro that claims to be a fully free copy of Arch. In
reviewing it I have some concerns:
1. The Parabola developers perform no rebranding of any kind. This results in
the installer claiming to the "Arch Linux". I've also found that the GRUB menu
lists it as "Arch Linux" when booting, and so does the login prompt. (There's
probably more, I imagine but that's where I stopped.)
I wonder how this fits in the the "we will not list a distribution whose name
makes confusion with non-free distributions likely" in the Free Distro
Guidelines?
I've also discovered this as of this afternoon: "We avoid having a kernel-free
distro (!) by packaging a vanilla kernel and applying ArchLinux's patches, but
deblobing everything before compiling and packaging." [2]
I took this to mean the binary has been "freed" but not the source. I then
grabbed the source from [3] and verified that it does indeed contain all of the
non-free parts of the kernel. I think that this means their kernel deblobbing
efforts are insufficent, if anyone is able to go and obtain the non-free bits
of the kernel in this way.