On Fri, Mar 05, 2004 at 06:08:33PM -0800, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote: > Sven Luther <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > Well, as you all know i have upto now be mostly a proponent of the keep > > non-free camp, because, altough i fully would prefer every software in > > debian to be free, i feel that this is not really yet the time for it. > > Ah, so there is a time for it? Can you please explain what that time > will be? (Either with a date, or a clear list of conditions.) > > I hope that the answer isn't "when there is nothing in non-free > anyhow".
I don't know. We, as a debian project, and the foss community at large, are not yet ready or willing to fight the writer of non-free drivers, so, i doubt the time is ready to get ride of other non-free software. But if you would have read the rest of my post, or my other mails, you would know that i advocate a case by case schedule for this to happen. Let's take two examples : netscape : it was in non-free a long time ago, and since the advance of mozilla and the other free browser, i believe it reached a point where we could sanely say that there is no use for the old netscape packages, and even that their continued existence posed a threat to security and such, and they could be removed. This maybe didn't happen as soon as it could have been, but it was because we didn't care enough, and because even the non-free removal advocate do care more aboure removing the word non-free from everything debian, than the actual freeness of the packages. java: well, i believe the moment is soon where kaffe and the other free implementation will be enough for not needing non-free java suites. This doesn't seem to be the exact right moment for this though, as there is still some work needed for kaffe and co, among them a free java plugin for mozilla. Well, java is currently not on non-free, but it is the most used third party software. Do you seriously think that having java packages in non-free or not would have made any influence on the progress of alternative packages ? If so, i would be very interested to know strong facts that lead you to this conclusion, and not some vague argumentation. Friendly, Sven Luther
