On Wed, Jan 28, 2004 at 01:20:20PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: > On Mon, Jan 26, 2004 at 10:10:43PM +0100, Sven Luther wrote: > > On Mon, Jan 26, 2004 at 12:08:43PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: > > > On Fri, Jan 23, 2004 at 06:11:38PM +0100, Sven Luther wrote: > > > > On Thu, Jan 22, 2004 at 12:39:56PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: > > > > > and all GNU documentation shall use the GNU FDL henceforth." Equally, > > > > > it doesn't serve us to say "You'll take our non-free section away when > > > > > you pry our cold, dead hands from it." > > > > > > > > Nope, only when a free alternative for all of its content has been > > > > written. > > > > > > All of its content right now? Is there some freeze on adding new > > > packages to non-free I hadn't heard about? If so, that's odd, because > > > an ITP of a non-free package has been made on debian-devel within the > > > past few days. > > > > Sure, but hopefully there will be no more non-free software in some > > point of the future :)) > > Is that more or less likely to happen in the absence of a disincentive > to produce it?
I think that keeping or removing non-free will have null effect to the quantity of free vs non-free software that is available, nor on the ressource that are going to pe poured into developing free software. The mail you cite, which seems totally unreadable to me right now due to the use of some strange character by the mail archive, is probably a corrobation of this state of things. Not sure though, since i got only garbage in galeon. And anyway, my statement was that there would, in some time in the future, be no incentive to work on non-free stuff, because everyone had access to free alternatives of higher quality. > *Would* dropping non-free serve as a disincentive to produce non-free > software? Before making up one's mind, it might be worth considering > the opinions of Ken Lunde of Adobe Systems Inc., when a (very polite) > relicensing request was made of that company[1]. > > It would appear that at least in some cases, the retention of the > non-free section serves as an incentive to preserve the non-free > licensing of a work. Mmm, maybe i misunderstood then. But this is a problem of discussion with the upstream author, and i quite understand the tentation of wielding the 'remove non-free' stick to menace those people in the hope of them relicencing the stuff. I have my doubts of this happening, they will only find other excuses (oh, this is on non-free.org, should be enough, or we host it on our web servers, just write an install package). But anyway, by considering these cases only, and i think you can count them on the fingers of one hand, you don't take into account all the other packages where this is not nearly the case, those were it is not in upstream's hand, those whose licence got lost (i recently removed the old ocaml bignums, because the licence got lost in the DEC->Compaq->HP mess, and there is nobody at HP with time enough for searching for the paper. Upstream did a clean and free reimplementation, so it is not a problem, but still). And seriously do you think nvidia will revisite their licencing schemes because you remove non-free ? And imagine the support nightmare you will have when the nvidia packages are no more ? > It is scenarios like this that make me question the prediction that all > non-free software will just wither away if only we leave it alone. No, who said leaving them alone ? My proposal, which was clumsily done, and somwhat subsumed by Raul, was to keep non-free, but explicitly as a staging area only until a free alternative does exist, or the licence is freed. Putting the onus on the upstream author for the licence issues, by publicly archiving the discussion about freeing the software, and encouraging people to look for free alternatives. As soon as such a free alternative exist, or the licence changes, we scrap the package from non-free, and to bad for the upstream author who didn't want to free their stuff. This takes energy and people willing to follow it, but i believe it is a much more strong incentive than removing non-free. This makes it clear that they are second zone citizen in the FOSS (or whatever) community, and that we encourage active work to make them obsolet and favorize their competence (i would say concurence in french, but you don't say that in english, i think). By removing non-free, and relegating the distribution to third party archives, you are ignoring them, and much more likely to have the effect of 'leaving them alone' that you cite there. > Where "leaving it alone" means continuing to endorse it by providing it > on our mirror network, that is. Yeah, sure, will you don't consider distributing the stuff on a third party archive as leaving them alone, since you will give the users of actual non-free software no choice than turning to these third party archives. Let's not be hypocrit, and continue distributing non-free, but put a much bigger pressure to either free the code or replace it by free alternatives, and you will hurt the upstream much more than by removing non-free, after all, you will encourage their competence, and make them loose market share. Friendly, Sven Luther -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
