The real purpose of gNewSense
gNewSense is a derivative of Ubuntu Linux, which seeks to leave out absolutely everything that’s not Free Software. Now, Ubuntu already aims to use Free Software when possible, but when it comes down to it they’ll still offer a proprietary solution if it’s the only one available.
When gNewSense was announced, I joined much of the Linux crowd in shaking my head asking ‘why?’ - it may be nice philosophically, but it results in a lot of difficulties (read: things that don’t work), and hence is very much less useful, pragmatically speaking.
And lo, here is the answer to my question, which I only just stumbled upon:
[gNewSense is] like a reference implementation for Free Software. Standards often (alas, not often enough) ship with a reference implementation which focuses on correctness at the expense of everything else (including performance, scalability, and backward compatibility). You’re not actually supposed to use reference implementations in the real world; you’re supposed to test against them. gNewSense is the reference implementation of software freedom …
If you use Linux, knowing that your hardware works with it now is good; knowing that your hardware will always work with Linux is better. Again, this is from my purely pragmatic approach to software, as I try not to get caught up in the silly holy wars that abound.
It looks like gNewSense is going to be spun back into yet another ‘flavour’ (third paragraph) of Ubuntu, and supported by the latter community.