On Sun, Oct 01, 2000 at 01:39:34AM +1100, Peter Eckersley wrote: > > No. There's nothing wrong if someone feels dissapointed if "no" wins by 80%. > > It would mean that a brutal majority of the Debian developers care little > > about the politics of the Project. I would not find that result very > > amusing, that's for sure. > > Hi. I'm not a Debian developer (yet :), but I've got to say that that is > a very illogical claim. > > It is entirely consistent to believe very strongly in the creation of a > completely free operating system, but at the same time to believe that > *pragmatically*, the best way to achieve widespread use of this OS is > by keeping around a few packages of non-free software, until the free > alternatives are clearly *better*.
That's the whole point of this proposal. John feels that non-free has outlived its usefulness and should be purged now since the vast majority of people no longer need it (other than the software they already have installed, which wouldn't go away just because the packages did naturally..) I just ran vrms to see what it found on my system: some fonts, gpg modules, lha, mpg123, netscape, quake-lib, xanim The gpg modules I use for Debian - my RSA key has been unofficially retired. I plan to mail a revokation at the end of the year. lha can be made useless now that I have permission to re-pack quake-lib's upstream without it. netscape I won't need as soon as I have Mozilla's next milestone with SSL. mpg123 will be obsolete when I find the CD with these 4 old tracks whose mp3s don't play with xmms so I can re-rip them with ogg vorbis. What's that leave? fonts, quake-lib, and xanim? Please. The only piece of non-free software I couldn't actually get rid of right now is xanim. And that's too bad, considering it's second rate software that has worked correctly on perhaps ten files at most out of the dozens of video files I've tried to throw at it. Yes, I did try using the non-free codecs at one point. No help. It plays MJPEG okay, but I'd rather have a free player for that anyway. Any working free alternative would most certainly be better. I've been pleased with sdl-mpeg for mpeg video so far, but it doesn't do any AVI formats. YMM(and probably does)V. However if more than 80% of people feel that Debian would be lost without non-free software six years after Debian began, I've got to wonder if we have accomplished anything at all. I expect the GR to lose, but if it loses by that much, maybe something more fundamental is wrong... -- Joseph Carter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> GnuPG key 1024D/DCF9DAB3 Debian GNU/Linux (http://www.debian.org/) 20F6 2261 F185 7A3E 79FC The QuakeForge Project (http://quakeforge.net/) 44F9 8FF7 D7A3 DCF9 DAB3 Most of us feel that marketing types are like a dangerous weapon - keep 'em unloaded and locked up in a cupboard, and only bring them out when you need them to do a job. -- Craig Sanders
