On Sun, 2004-01-04 at 21:09, Don Armstrong wrote: > On Sun, 04 Jan 2004, Mark Brown wrote: > > I think there's room for something along the lines of "I want to > > spin non-free off as a separate project". Much of the concern over > > dropping non-free seems to be about having things just suddenly > > vanish. > > There's nothing in these proposals that would preclude the spinning > off of non-free as a separate project. If someone wants to create such > a project, they should just go out and create it. >
No-one will create it until there is a need to do so; as long as we provide non-free, there will not be any such need. We have a commitment to maintain it as long as it is needed (social contract) and we should abide by that commitment; not chop and change for ideological reasons. To change the social contract would be a major change in Debian's character and would also be a violation of a commitment that we have already made. I don't think that would be any better morally than a commercial firm's decision to abandon support for a product which was not sufficiently profitable. In the end, reliability and loyalty to our users are a lot more important than ideological purity. The reason for providing non-free is just the same as it ever was: for the convenience of users who want to use Debian and also need to use packages that do not meet DFSG requirements. I think it is more important to care for users' convenience than for FSF purity; if you want aggressive promotion of free software purity, the FSF exists for that purpose and has its own archive. Any user who doesn't like non-free can simply exclude it from his sources.list. The time to get rid of non-free is when it no longer has any maintained packages; not until then. -- Oliver Elphick [EMAIL PROTECTED] Isle of Wight, UK http://www.lfix.co.uk/oliver GPG: 1024D/3E1D0C1C: CA12 09E0 E8D5 8870 5839 932A 614D 4C34 3E1D 0C1C ======================================== "And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might." Deuteronomy 6:5
