Roberto C. Sánchez <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > For non-free software, the sources are not (always) necessary. > Permission to redistribute is usually sufficient, as Russ has already > pointed out in this thread.
It's probably also worth noting that this is a necessary but not sufficient condition for inclusion in non-free. Another problem that would have to be resolved is security support over the lifetime of a Debian stable release. For closed-source, non-free large commercial software packages like Opera (and Oracle Express, and others) that are already distributed as Debian packages by the companies that sell them, it's unclear to me what advantages there are in including packages in Debian non-free. I can see creating a new Debian package if some Debian developer wants to put in the work to better integrate the software into Debian, but just dropping the vendor's Debian package in our archive seems like entirely pointless makework that potentially causes problems for the security team down the road. This is why apt supports multiple package sources. Just point it at the vendor's repository. -- Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
