On Tue, Mar 31, 1998 at 03:43:42PM -0700, Bob Nielsen wrote: > On Tue, 31 Mar 1998, King Lee wrote: > > > I want Linux to become a viable alternative to Microsoft, not > > because I hate Microsoft, but because Linux is better in many > > circumstances. I would like corporate information technology > > managers to use Linux for mail servers, print servers, and > > whatever else Linux is better at. The problem is that managers > > are unfamilar with Linux. They may be willing to > > run dselect, but one cannot expect them to search the net > > for a package, download it, and run "dpkg -i file". > > dselect will do this also (ftp method). deity/apt (or whatever is the > name du jour) will do it more slickly.
I think one and even a more important problem than managers are privat users. As today, also "normal" home users can manage to run a Linux system with an acceptable amount of work, there are more and more ones that want to test it. So, for instance quite a lot of my friends are very happy, using Linux. But in fact, nearly no one has such good connectivity that it's fun using the ftp-method for installing packages and phone costs are high as well. Another thing is, that you can pass a CD round easiely, but not evryone has the equipment, to share downloaded files without bigger efforts. So in my opinion, it is important to have non-free on CDs. The idea of keeping up a list of files from non-free which can be burnt on CD without hesitating would be a very good thing. It might be just a directory with symlinks to packages in non-free. So there would not be too much to change. Sure, it is a lot of work, but if you want to make a debian archive out of a program, you have to read the License anyway. So adding a symlink should be an acceptable effort, not? If you want to distribute debian, and have to go through every licence in non-free... wouldn't you drop non-free? peter. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
