On Sat, Jan 03, 2004 at 03:00:50PM -0500, Anthony DeRobertis wrote: > I am not a DD (yet), and this is not a GR proposal (yet). However, I'm > requesting comments on it, and maybe it'll be more tenable to people > more reluctant to remove non-free.
Thanks for posting this. I think it's probably the best statement of what this non-free proposal might be about that I've seen to date. > PROPOSAL 1 > -------- - > > Whereas, > the Debian Project exists to create a distribution of free software; > > many Developers do not consider it moral or equitable to provide, > freely, our project's resources to projects who are unwilling or > unable to provide their code freely to the public; Two issues here: morality, and equitablity. [*] Morality: can you provide any reference to this moral code? [*] Equitability: what is the unfairness, specifically > the importance of non-free software has greatly decreased since the > founding of the project; and How do you measure this? > outside groups have been quite able to provide well-integrated > software no harder to obtain than that from Debian's own mirror > network: I don't know what you're talking about here -- perhaps you should ennumerate these groups. The examples I'm aware of fall into two categories: [*] temporary, development efforts [*] commercial outfits which limit access to the result. If it's the latter you're referring to... I think it's hypocritical to compare what we have in non-free to commercial software. While the software in non-free doesn't meet our guidelines -- and we can't fully support it -- we still can package it and distribute it fairly broadly. This is not the case, in general, for commercial software. -- Raul
