On Fri, Jan 02, 2004 at 08:09:09PM +0000, MJ Ray wrote: > On 2004-01-02 10:33:23 +0000 Emmanuel Charpentier > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >Because I somehow doubt that the current technical and social > >infrastructures > >behind Debian "non-free" can be currently duplicated "somewhere else". > Debian did it.
Almost all the support for non-free in Debian is a free result of our support for free software. The n-m process, the BTS, the PTS, the mailing lists, policy, our security infrastructure, our buildds, our mirror network, release management, buildds all have to exist whether we support non-free or not, and none of them would be significantly simpler or even different if we didn't support non-free. The archive might be a little simpler if we drop both non-free and contrib; if we don't drop contrib as well, it's no simpler. Which is to say, Debian did all it's done in order to support free software. Whatever effort's spent on this new non-free network, most of it is going to be of no benefit to those of us who don't use non-free software. Basically, the issue is why spend 100 man hours on maintaining Debian, then another 90 man hours on maintaining a separate non-free repository, when you can spend 101 man hours maintaining Debian and it's existing support for non-free? Cheers, aj -- Anthony Towns <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/> I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred. Linux.conf.au 2004 -- Because we can. http://conf.linux.org.au/ -- Jan 12-17, 2004
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