Jérôme Marant <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Mark Rafn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > If it's part of emacs, then it's very clearly non-free software and the > > whole thing should be removed from Debian (unless the FSF doesn't have to > > follow everyone else's definition of freedom). > > "The whole thing"? Emacs itself?
No. Ripping out the non-free parts has been done before for other cases. > >> You mentioned in a previous mail packaging old versions of manuals. > >> This is IMHO pretty useless because noone cares for outdated manuals. > > > > Some of us don't care for non-free manuals either. There are a number of > > cases where I choose to use free software over non-free software that > > meets my current needs somewhat better. I'm glad Debian helps me make > > that choice, and I don't understand why documentation would be any > > different. > > Probably because free equivalents of non-free docs are not likely > to appear, unless those non-free docs get their license changed. > People don't like writing docs. That's a very poor reason to accept a non-free license. The following is _not_ something I want to seed in the DFSG: - Documentation is exempt from the above criteria for freeness. No-one likes to write documentation, so we'll accept whatever we can get into Debian. > >> Althought people can be motivated in forking or reimplementing > >> applications, I doubt anyone will be motivated enough to fork > >> documentation and noone'll be able to be as up-to-date as the > >> Emacs manual. > > > > I see the motivations as very similar. > > Did people suddenly decide to love writing docs? That's not relevant. The need for them will be made more obvious if the non-free version get moved to main. Should we have accepted netscape into main a few years ago then it was _the_ standard and nothing else was available? Peter
