With regard to IceWeasel rather than FireFox, I appreciate the naming licence issues – but isn’t this a Debian only issue? I could only find this page about IceWeasel for Windows and it’s only in Alpha.

I think many more people might *want* to hack applications than we realise: someone in a neighbouring office here was infuriated that identically-named options in a dialogue box and a menu in their word processor did different things and wished they could rename one. I suspect if they had the source and a build tool there, so they could search for that string, edit one of the two and recompile, then they might have done it and sent a patch upstream. If only we’d made it easy enough for them.

I’ve also heard of a few people (usually women, curiously enough) taken on in non-developer roles who have become software developers because they were in an environment where the last resort of “hack it yourself” was possible.

One drawback is probably that people who don’t remember the home microcomputers don’t realise just how flexible and fixable these programs are. Do some people not want to hack programs mainly because they don’t realise that hacking is possible? In this age of lockdowns and ever-more-criminalised copyright infringment, the idea is simply foreign to them.

So, maybe there’s a danger of a sort of techie-snobbery being entrenched by these CDs if we think that freedom to modify isn’t important for some of this audience? Although we need to be careful not to force them to walk it, shouldn’t we make it obvious the path exists?

For example, i use dynebolic for multimedia stuff (i think the media flavour of ngo-in-a-bo is based on this). This take advantage of desktop processing power & doesn’t rely on a good net connection. You can just pick the kind of system you need, pop it in the cd drive, boot up and away you go.

When i worked on a website for asylum seekers & refugees i used an indian language live cd which ran open office in bengali. so much easier than trying to internationlise a local system!

Doesn’t it depend on the purpose of the CD in the first place? My thinking here is that it’s a disc of software that people who struggle to find them online to download themselves might find useful. I dare say that they are unlikely to want to start hacking these applications once they have got them

So, in my thinking it’s the free-as-in-beer and free distribution that are the important bits, rather than having free source code. Not that free code isn’t important, but perhaps not for this audience.

Pointing people at online resources is OK, but networks are expensive for many and a lot of those are even less fixable.