On Sat, Jan 10, 2004 at 11:43:28AM +0000, Andrew M.A. Cater wrote: > On Sat, Jan 10, 2004 at 10:26:28AM +0100, Michael Banck wrote: > > [CCing -devel as I am making a technical proposal, see below.] > > > > On Sat, Jan 10, 2004 at 06:57:09PM +1100, Craig Sanders wrote: > > > so, what exactly is in non-free? > > > > Thanks a lot for the effort, Craig. > > > > > since no-one else has bothered to answer this question, i did it myself. > > > a > > > classification of every non-free package that was in my debian mirror. a > > > total > > > of 273 packages, but only 259 packages had a 'copyright' file (odd, i > > > thought > > > there were more...about 350 or so. we must have got rid of a lot of > > > non-free > > > packages). > > > > [...] > > > > > i DID NOT exhaustively analyse each license. i looked quickly at each > > > one to > > > try to find out why it had been classified as non-free. in some cases, > > > that > > > means i may not have noted down all the reasons why a particular package > > > is > > > non-free. > > > > Maybe as a first measure, we could mass-file wishlist bugs against > > non-free packages, asking the maintainer to put a small paragraph into > > the copyright file with an explanation as to why this is in non-free? > > I think that would be helpful at least for future examinations like > > this, but could also be used to auto-generate a website with all the > > summaries, if this paragraph would be written in a fixed form. > Thanks both. > > Without wishing to (re)start the separate docs aren't software thread > from a couple of months back when we were discussing the DFSG :) > > Could the Project rename non-free to non-DFSG-free to > re-emphasise the fundamental reason why it's there? > > Can we split the non-free archive? A section saying non-mod-docs > might be useful to take the W3C docs and the GFDL stuff, at least. > > [For the W3C docs, for example, there is no reason except convenience > why they would _have_ to be served from .debian.org - could we get them > to host the .debs of their own documentation? ]
The problem with third party servers, is for how long they will be able to make a commitment, and how will the end user know that this is the right place for searching them, and be sure he can trust a random apt-source he place in his list. Friendly, Sven Luther
