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Image credit: http://trisquel.info

Trisquel is a 100 per cent 'free as in free speech' GNU/Linux distribution started by Rubn Rodrguez Prez nine years ago.

"It started as a project at the university I was studying at. They just wanted a custom distro because... everybody was doing that at the time!" Prez says.

"Since I'm very stubborn, the project kept going," Prez adds.

The idea of software freedom the kind of freedoms Richard Stallman laid out in the GNU Manifesto in 1985 and the original GPL in 1989 are central to Trisquel. (In 2005, when Trisquel 1.0 was launched, GNU founder Stallman was part of the occasion.)

By software freedom "we mean the basic liberties the software user should have: those of using, studying, improving and sharing the software without limitations," Prez says.

"It is a very important issue, because we now use computers for everything: our work, our leisure, our studies; and we should do it under our control. If the government uses software to manage data about the citizens, they should have the code to know for sure how the data is being treated and to guarantee privacy.

"If a school uses a computer for the kids to learn, they should be allowed to study how the tool is made and never get their teacher to answer 'you cannot know that'."

The distro was originally based on Debian's testing repository, but over the course of several years, Trisquel shifted to using Ubuntu as a base.

"The reason was to get a more predictable schedule to work on, and also because we felt that with Ubuntu gaining users it would be good to have a free drop-in replacement to it," Prez says.

Link:
Trisquel GNU/Linux flies the flag for software freedom