On Sun, Jan 11, 2004 at 11:50:43PM -0500, Nathanael Nerode wrote: > John Goerzen wrote: > > What's more, if there really are as many people that find > >non-free vital, they will no doubt posess the skill, will, and resources > >to ensure that a quality non-free repository will exist for a long time. > >I very much suspect they will do a better job maintaining it than we > >have to date. As a result, our users' pain will be only the slight one > >of an edit to sources.list and a dselect update. > > That's a good argument. However, to play devil's advocate, what if the > result is that Debian Developers start trying harder to sneak non-free > stuff into "main"? At this point, given the amount of non-free stuff > which *already* lives in main, I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised.
That's an interesting angle that I haven't seen mentioned before. I think I can see two sides to that coin. On the one hand, I don't think that there will be any impact on the discussions in debian-legal. People there are already fairly well accustomed to analyzing licenses on their merits. Yes, I think it could mean more resistance on the part of developers. But, I haven't really seen much resistance to date, and I don't think it will be a great problem. As far as sneaking non-free into main... again, I don't think this has been a huge problem. I think that most non-free works in main are those which were historically considered free (perhaps because we didn't understand their non-freeness in the past, or perhaps because of changing circumstances upstream, or other matters) but which now are considered non-free. The problem of non-free snuck into main is one which will eventually be exposed; it is, in fact, impossible to hide this from other developers with prying eyes. > Currently Debian has maintainers who refuse to remove non-free works > from *main*. Do you think they're going to become more reasonable about > this if non-free is removed? I think they're going to become *less* > reasonable. Again, I haven't seen this as a huge problem; for instance, with the GIF transition a few years back, cooperation usually was good. IIRC, the largest problems were with lethargic maintainers that weren't maintaining their packages anyway. > Incidentally, have you started work on removing the non-free GNU > documentation from your system and replacing it? This work is going to > take a while. Indeed, and unfortunately I lack both the time and expertise for doing that. Thanks for your thought-provoking post. -- John
