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Re: Discussion - non-free software removal



On Tue, Nov 19, 2002 at 11:41:16PM +1100, Hamish Moffatt wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 17, 2002 at 06:32:57PM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote:
> > If you feel that Free Software community should be subordinated to the
> > needs of our users, then you should propose an amendment to John's
> > General Resolution stating that.  If he rejects it and it acquires
> > sufficient seconds, your amended proposal will appear on the ballot.
> 
> Do you believe that our users are not members of the free software
> community?

It depends on what you believe the criteria for membership in the
community to be; however, the answer is irrelevant to my point, which is
that the two priorities are given co-equal status in our Social
Contract.

That is while we must not sacrifice the needs of our users to the needs
of Free Software, neither must we sacrifice the needs of Free Software
to the needs of our users.

It is difficult to achieve such a balance; I submit that refusing to
support users of our system who happen to use or develop non-free
software on their systems would be just as much of an error as
distributing everything we possibly can from our mirrors, paying only
enough attention to license to sort each package into one bin or
another.

> Or that no member of the free software community has any need
> for non-DFSG software?

This is implied by neither by my message nor by the proposed GR.

-- 
G. Branden Robinson                |    I just wanted to see what it looked
Debian GNU/Linux                   |    like in a spotlight.
branden@debian.org                 |    -- Jim Morrison
http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |

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