The appearance in the past year of so-called "completely libre" distributions such as gNewSense and Gobuntu, especially against the backdrop of existing distributions, like BLAG, Dyne:bolic, Ututo and others, might seem to point to an increased interest in software freedom. Should we be looking for the "rise of the completely libre distros", or is there something more subtle that we should notice?

I don't know about you, but the announcements of gNewSense and Gobuntu over the past year got me wondering if we might see more such distributions coming down the pike. I'm talking about distributions that remove all of the non-Free software from their packages and repositories and get the Free Software Foundation's stamp of approval. It was gNewSense last year and Ututo the year before that. BLAG likes to boast that they've been around longer than Fedora. Dyne:bolic offers users a multimedia experience using only Free Software. And Fedora is moving to purge its packages of non-Free software, even if it doesn't make the Free Software Foundation's list.

Many people seem to think that Free Software lovers are a small but vocal minority.

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