Syrus Nemat-Nasser <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >On 8 Jun 2000, Chuan-kai Lin wrote: >> There is a General Resolution proposed by developer John Goerzen that >> is under discussion on both debian-devel and debian-project, maybe also >> a few others that I am not aware of. The nature of the GR is to amend >> the Social Contract so that Debian will stop distributing non-free >> packages. If the GR is passed, then Debian will no longer provide the >> storage, bandwidth, and bug tracking facilities for non-free packages, >> including acroread, blender, netscape, jdk, povray, trn, and xanim. > >This may be a good time to transition support for the non-free packages to >an organization outside Debian. I imagine that a number of companies would >jump at the chance to host the bug tracking system for Debian non-free.
I sincerely hope we don't have to do this. Regardless of your feelings about non-free, it's still hosted in a non-commercial way at the moment. If a company decided to host it, I'd always have a niggling fear at the back of my mind saying "What if they wanted to charge a 'nominal fee' for the 'service' of letting me download from non-free?". The GPL would let them do this, for one. I would much prefer if some Debian developers got together and hosted a non-free archive, in the (IMHO unpleasant) situation where this became necessary. There has been talk of this; I hope it won't come to that, because it's still more difficult for users to find, it's a waste of resources, and concentrating on linking its quality to that of Debian's would be doubly hard. >Think about this: With the distribution of tools such as Borland's Kylix, >there may soon be a flood of non-free Linux applications. Many of these >may use a shareware or demo-ware distribution strategy to maximize >exposure. Also, with Debian and Debian-derived distributions becoming more >popular, there should be Debianized versions of most commercial offerings. Even a separate non-free archive couldn't distribute those; at present non-free can include pretty much anything that *can* be distributed freely. If commercial software companies want to distribute Debian packages of their programs for a fee, they're still going to have to do it themselves. -- Colin Watson [EMAIL PROTECTED]
