On Sat, Mar 06, 2004 at 10:23:29AM +0100, Michael Banck wrote: > On Sat, Mar 06, 2004 at 08:48:31AM +0100, Sven Luther wrote: > > 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. > > To iterate: I consider this as the prime example for the failure of the > 'getting rid of non-free, because better Free alternatives exist now' > theory. > > To the best of my knowledge, Netscape did *not* get removed because > 'Mozilla/Konqueror/Galeon are better', but because 'Oops, we can't fix > that zlib bug and there is no upstream fix'.
Yeah, but that is a failure in the process of handling non-free, not because this is what we wanted. And mostly because the remove non-free proponents didn't care enough to ask for its removal at that time. And if you remember well, my position is to keep non-free for now, but to more actively work to be able to remove non-free packages individually, either because the licence changed or because a free alternative has been found. And i don't see anyone of the drop non-free proponent specially active in advocating free replacement of packages in non-free. Friendly, Sven Luther
