Re: General Resolution: Removing non-free
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> writes:
> >>"John" == John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> writes:
>
> >> I think I disagree. I have not found Mozilla to be as yet an
> >> adequatre replacement for netscape; nor can I find something for the
> >> festvox packages, and I certainly would hate to lose angband and
> >> zangband (which are only in non free since they prevent commercial
> >> use; the sources are freely available for modification).
>
> John> I don't think that games justify the continued support of non-free
> John> software.
>
> Please read up on festvox before you start labelling it. I
> think this reinforces my impression; you have not looked at the
> packages in non-free, and have not a clue about what you are
> advocating throwing away.
I was not labeling festvox as a game. You cited games; I was
disagreeing with that as a justification.
> You know, removing those packages would go a long way towards
> diminishing Debians credibility as a modern Linux. I have had people
> ask me if Debian could do java? Could it do ecommerce? did we have
> netscape? Could they move their servers off solaris, and have all the
> java survive the move? And I could say, hey, we have the same apache,
> and mysql; you can get the the same jdk -- but remove the non-free
> stuff, and even my ability tohandle pdf diminishes since gs-aladdin
> would go away too.
But you would be wrong. The Debian system does not have those. They
only exist in connection to Debian on our archive. What difference
does it make to people like that exactly where they get it? It will
still be available and they can still use it. And an installer in
contrib that uses wget is not that much harder to use anyway.
> I think this GR is waaaay premature.
You continuously suffer from fallacious overuse of the anecdote. So
somebody asked you about Java. Are we to abandon our Free Software
foundation simply because of that? Or because of Netscape?
Your correct answer to the above questions will not change after this
General Resolution is passed. It should be, "It will run on Debian
but it is not shipped with the system."
By the way, few other operating systems ship with all of the above
either.
-- John
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