What's more, if there really are as many people that find non-free vital, they will no doubt posess the skill, will, and resources to ensure that a quality non-free repository will exist for a long time. I very much suspect they will do a better job maintaining it than we have to date. As a result, our users' pain will be only the slight one of an edit to sources.list and a dselect update.
That's a good argument. However, to play devil's advocate, what if the result is that Debian Developers start trying harder to sneak non-free stuff into "main"? At this point, given the amount of non-free stuff which *already* lives in main, I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised.
I am quite well aware of the implications of non-free removal. At the time I first proposed it, I maintained a package that would itself be removed. I am not confused or delusional about this point.
Currently Debian has maintainers who refuse to remove non-free works from *main*. Do you think they're going to become more reasonable about this if non-free is removed? I think they're going to become *less* reasonable.
Incidentally, have you started work on removing the non-free GNU documentation from your system and replacing it? This work is going to take a while.
I've been trying to get started with making replacements, but I've been moving slowly. And so have the people who initially volunteered to help me. :-/ I need a reliable GForge-like site; should I perhaps use Alioth, or it is too busy and this too "non-Debian" a project?
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