Colin Watson wrote: > 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] > > -- > Unsubscribe? mail -s unsubscribe [EMAIL PROTECTED] < /dev/null
Certainly I second Colin. This would be the craziest thing ever, having what Syrus Nemat-Nasser sees as good!!!!
