The thing that you are setting aside is that this policy precisely mirrors the current handling of non-free and contrib on CD. Furthermore, this approach handles the problem of dealing with packages that do not allow redistribution. It will be up to these secondary distributors to secure permission to distribute these packages but we will have easy access to them for development and bug tracking.
The alternative, apparently, will be some sort of external organization that deals with non-free. Inevitably we will have to come to terms with such an organization and draft policy for dealing with it's packages and inevitably other such organizations will start and we'll be stuck with a whole new mess of administrative headaches. That sucks. I think if you carefully examine current Debian policy you will see that we have created a two-class society of users. Our CD images do not contain non-free and contrib but our on-line distribution does. So, for some reason, we have determined that users with broadband Internet (principally 1st world users) have some special right to questionably licensed software that third world users do not. Surely that sucks as well. My real preference, of course, is that we screw non-free altogether. Realistically that can't occur. The sensible alternative I am advocating simply brings on-line distribution into line with CD distribution. If you really don't like my idea then you should be recommending a GR to add non-free and contrib to the CD distribution. On Saturday 13 March 2004 12:28 am, Martin Schulze wrote: > Have you thought how well this would work with ftp, http and rsync > mirroring and changes in the Debian infrastructure? > > I mean, if all first level mirrors will have non-free and contrib > removed, somebody will grab the files and we'll end up with a mirror > network that contains Debian (i.e. main) and several undocumentatly > distributing contrib and non-free as well, making the situation only > worse for us and our users. > > Since many people loudly vote for keeping non-free, do you think you > would really make them smile when locking away non-free? > > Since it gets into conflict with the social contract wrt. distribution > of non-free software, it'll require a GR as well, I guess. -- Ean Schuessler, CTO Brainfood, Inc. http://www.brainfood.com
