On Mon, Mar 08, 2004 at 09:31:40PM -0800, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote: > Sven Luther <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > You aim for it to no longer be supported on officialy visible debian > > ressource, the fact that this will probably be the same DD volunteer > > time going in maintaining the supposed non-free.org infrastructure, make > > this a fiction, and a non-efficient one in the long run. > > I don't make any claims on the time of Debian developers. They can > spend that time or not. Many Debian developers already maintain > separate apt-get repositories. The BTS is a help, but not the only > way to manage bug reports.
Yeah, but just because you say something, it is not necessarily reality. > In my opinion, non-free software is not part of Debian. Time spent > maintaining it is *already* time taken away from Debian. Which is why it is best to minimize said time. > > I do believe that the presence of a recognized and legimitized > > non-free.org will be counter productive to this effort, so we clearly > > disagree. LEt's have this discussion again a few years from now, only > > time will tell which of us was right. (Probably none or both will be > > though, which is why i think removing non-free should be done on a > > package by package basis). > > Do you believe that only the maintainer should judge the case? Would > you agree to some set of standards to avoid having non-free packages > which are unnecessary, but which the maintainer for whatever reason > likes? Naturally i would. The maintainer has the best interaction with upstream, and is the best to judge over both the possibility of upstream freeing the licence and the reality of free replacement, but i know that some maintainers can be stubborn on those issues, but i guess the technical commitee has already the power to override them on this. And naturally, it seems that most maintainers of non-free stuff are MIA anyway, or don't care about the packages. Friendly, Sven Luther
