On Thu, Oct 26, 2000 at 04:08:03AM -0500, Christian T. Steigies wrote: > > You miss my point, i am not speaking about big companies but about smaller > > groups, individuals or research institues or other such. > If you continue like this, I think you make me change my mind about debian > and non-free...
John's proposal is, IMO, a reaction to a growing movement within Debian against the DFSG. I do believe that movement exists and has always existed to some degree, but it's on the rise as Linux gains in popularity and new people care less and less about the free foundation on which Debian stands. They are the people who wanted to split non-free into non-cd and non-free. They're the people who think the DFSG is too restrictive, and they're a part of the group who believe Debian can't divorce itself of non-free software now. (In fact, they don't believe it could or should do so ever..) The real question to answer is simple: Is John's proposal the right solution? I don't think so. A lot of people don't. Add to that an almost MIA secretary and a tech ctte chair who's openly against the proposal to the point of trying to undermine it actively before it gets voted on and at least the appearance of the same from the MIA secretary (who hasn't been around to answer complaints - though he has said at least that he's not trying to prevent it from getting voted on), and have a very big, very convoluted mess very quickly. > > I myself maintain the ocaml package, developped at french INRIA. it was > > previously distributed under a free but only distribute as pristin source + > > patch (well no binaries). and couldn't go even in non-free without > > permission > > from the author. There are loads of GPLed and other free stuff which > > depended > Its a free package but can not even go into non-free? I don't get that. ... he considers it free enough, apparently, despite Debian's silly guidelines that say otherwise. -- 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 <wichert> 8am is an ungoldly hour to be awake :) * gorgo usually gets up at 11am
