Zenaan Harkness writes: > Assumption: There will forever be different definitions of free. > > Question: what would it take to provide to the user the option to choose > "FSF Free" as well as "DFSG Free" (and perhaps "OSI") as the set of > packages they wish to install?
What would be the specific benefit to users of doing this? There are two significant and unavoidable costs to provide this feature: The infrastructure support for it and the policy work for it. The infrastructure support would be adding headers to all packages to identify their type(s) of freeness, and updating tools to support that. Is it worth the effort to support this when other projects (X, AMD64, etc) could use the manpower in ways that are clearly beneficial to Debian's users? The policy work involves the actual identification of freeness. DFSG-free is a (I believe strict) subset of OSI-free, and probably a superset of FSF-free. Why "probably"? See the disagreement over packages like upstream Linux. Debian can (and has) clarified the DFSG to resolve ambiguity; since Debian defines the DFSG, it is the obvious arbiter for interpretation of the DFSG. Who would arbitrate for other types of freeness? I see both the infrastructure and policy issues as being significant reasons to *not* identify packages as "FSF Free" or "OSI Free" or anything except "DFSG Free" (as in main vs non-free). It would take some very big benefits to users to outweigh those cons. Michael
