On Sun, Jan 04, 2004 at 09:48:01AM -0500, Dale E Martin wrote: > > The question isn't _what_ it's about, but what the point of it is -- > > what the goal is, what the achievement will be, what the aim is, _why_ > > this is worth doing. > To me, it's worth doing because of your last sentence. We (the Debian > project) should concentrate our resources on software that is DFSG free.
Uh, we're already doing that. Very few Debian resources are spent on non-DFSG-free stuff. A single day's uploads takes more disk space and bandwidth than the entirety of non-free. None of the regular maintenance work is non-free specific. > Any individual developer can work on whatever they want, of course, > including setting up servers that serve non-free. If our mirrors want to > carry non-free, that's fine as well. Which means the only resources we can "concentrate" are our servers, not our developers' time, which means we get _no_ benefit from this, as far as I can see. > All in all there is little practical consequence of this proposal, IMHO. But that's not true. The practical consequences are many: Debian ceases supporting every non-free package, non-free maintainers have to setup their own archives, contrib becomes at best much harder to support well and at worst unsupported. > It's more about philosophy. Consider that many > people outside the project consider Debian to be the only morally "pure" > (i.e. not motivated by commercial gain) distribution. Consider that many people outside the project consider non-free software to be important, and that Debian's balanced stance on the matter -- make the distinction clear, but don't be otherwise prejudiced about them -- achieves all our goals. 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
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature
