On Fri, Mar 26, 2004 at 07:01:41PM +0100, Dale C. Scheetz wrote: > There is no contradiction between declaring Debian to be totally about > Free Software, and the maintaining of a section called non-free. The > non-free packages are examples of software that fails to meet our > definition of free, which the rest of the world considers "free enough".
Uhm, 'the rest of the world' considers binary-only drivers 'free enough'? > The fact that we can "legally" distribute this code makes that > distribution completely "OK" by the rest of the software community not > committed to software freedom as Debian defines it. I don't think RedHat or SuSE ship any significant package from non-free in their default distribution, apart from the binary-only drivers of course. > We provide examples of the right way to build Debian packages in many > different places, although I find the existing code base to be full of > both good and bad examples, our documentation is mostly self consistant. What does this have to do with the non-free debate? > Negative examples tend to improve our understanding faster than positive > ones. Being able to point to packages with "poor" licensing conditions > has always been helpful when trying to determine what is wrong with some > other license. Why would pointing to packages at non-free.org be worse in this regard? I'd say it would be even better, as they are clearly marked as having a poor license. > I don't have much time to devote to Debian these days, but that doesn't > mean that I don't still find it very important. Yeah, tuning into this discussion is the best you can do with your little time in order to help Debian! > The Contract and Guidelines were written specifically to block political > modification of the goals and principles of Debian. If Debian is to > survive, this attempt to modify our principles must fail. When the Guidelines were written, you needed non-free software to actually upload a package into the archive, to the best of my knowledge. Non-free software was not a commodity back then, it was very hard to get any work done without it I guess. These times have changed. Today, the 'almost-free' packages in non-free are mostly insignificant for most users. In contrast, by far the most important ones are the binary-only drivers nowadays. non-free has changed. I don't see why Debian should not reevaluate its support. Well, we did, and we agreed to support non-free for the time being, so I don't understand why you're making such a fuss about it. Michael -- Michael Banck Debian Developer [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.advogato.org/person/mbanck/diary.html
