On Wed, Jan 07, 2004 at 08:44:19AM -0600, Manoj Srivastava wrote: > > As time passes, it appears to me more and more that the continued > > presence of non-free is incompatible with the long-term interests of > > our stated goals, users and free software. > > I beg to differ. Indeed, the very reason for having non-free > is because the software performs a function that is useful to users, > despite no meeting our guidelines.
Ah, but that is a short-term interest. I specifically singled out long-term interests in my statement. > And it helps free software two fold: it a helps in > transitioning packages to free-er licenses (ncftp, qt, etc), and it > gets us a wider audience (people who would have not chosen Debian > without the support for the non-free stuff). Once in the fold, they > are exposed to the ideas of free software, they espouse, and > proselytize, Debian. I still have yet to see anyone demonstrate that this is all impossible, or even significantly more difficult, by putting on-free on a different FTP server. > Everyone knows that Debian can't package all software there is > out there, so absence of the software reflects on the incompleteness > of Debian to the casual end user; having the software labelled as > non-free reflects on the software package. This, of course, assumes that the casual end user has non-free in sources.list; regularly checks what section of the archive things come from on install time; and knows what non-free means. I think these are all shaky assumptions to make about the casual end-user, especially since apt-get does not say what section a package is in. > > We are now long past the era where technical hurdles prevented > > spinning non-free off of Debian. We have a set of people that are > > capable of maintaining it by itself. We also have a situation where > > Got anything to back this up? Who are these people? Do they > have the resources you say they are capable of marshalling? Of the people arguing against removing non-free, I know that many of them are skilled enough to maintain a Debian archive. While I don't know of specific hosting arrangements, I also know that many less knowledgable people than they are able to find ample hosting, and I suspect that this would not be a big difficulty given the level of support they suggest non-free enjoys. -- John -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
