On Fri, 2004-11-12 at 10:17, Arnaud Vandyck wrote:
> I read the subject of this mail nearly twice a week or more and I
> hesitate to answer or not. I doubt because this bug report raise another
> question: does Debian support non-free JDK?
>
> I'd like to answer NO! But there is something schizophrenic in DFSG#4:
>
> ,----[ /usr/share/doc/debian/social-contract.txt ]
> | 4. Our priorities are our users and free software
I also ask myself such question from time to time, and here's how
I understand the policy.
1. There's nothing that would force a debian developer to *touch*
(or maintain) non-free software if he's not willing to do so.
2. If a user installs/uses any non-free software on his system
and reports bugs/problems - we should treat these just as any others
we're given, with the difference, that we do not necessarily are
responsible for the state of non-free software.
These two points seem to form kind of boundaries of what IMO is
allowed by the policy. What to do in individual cases depends
on a developer. In particular for 2) an important thing is to
maintain binary compatibility with other distros.
HTH
Grzegorz B. Prokopski
--
Grzegorz B. Prokopski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Debian GNU/Linux http://www.debian.org
SableVM - LGPL'ed Java VM http://www.sablevm.org
Why SableVM ?!? http://sablevm.org/wiki/Features
