Richard, Debian has pledged in our social contract to support our users of non-free software and our users in general, please review http://www.debian.org/social_contract, particularly point 5.
I explicitly acknowledged in my previous message that Debian is going to do this. If you think I was disputing this issue, I guess my previous message was not clear. It is entirely accurate to say that *Debian* has to ask that question. The social contract says that Debian should support non-free software as well as free software, but there are many ways to do that. Until now, Debian has not asked users a question of this kind. So I hope that people will keep in mind the other alternative ways to carry out the social contract, and not assume that asking this kind of question is the only way.