Re: General Resolution: Removing non-free
>>"John" == John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> writes:
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.
John> I was not labeling festvox as a game. You cited games; I was
John> disagreeing with that as a justification.
I cited a number of pacvkages, and yes, some were
games. Dismissing my objections in that fashion (essentially ignoring
the fact that what I pointed out were a sampling of the packages in
non-free, and a whole lot of them are not games) is what I object
to.
>> 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.
John> But you would be wrong. The Debian system does not have those. They
John> only exist in connection to Debian on our archive. What difference
John> does it make to people like that exactly where they get it? It will
John> still be available and they can still use it. And an installer in
John> contrib that uses wget is not that much harder to use anyway.
Because they are add-ons to the Debian distribution that we
make available (yes, I know they are not part of Debian).
Now, where exactly do you think these non-free packages shall
be available from? Who shall host the servers? Where shall the
non-free BTS reside? And how shall Debian be compensated for the time
developers spend on this vaourware infrastructure?
Until a parralell system is in place, one can just as
reasonably assume that the non-free packages shan't be available to
users. Indeed, that is much more reasonable an assumption that
magically there shall be a distribution system and BTS that shall
spring into place.
>> I think this GR is waaaay premature.
John> You continuously suffer from fallacious overuse of the anecdote. So
John> somebody asked you about Java. Are we to abandon our Free Software
John> foundation simply because of that? Or because of Netscape?
No. But we should endeavor to support our users who need to
run java and netscape. We do so now. We should not make our offering
less versatile.
John> By the way, few other operating systems ship with all of the above
John> either.
Is that relevant? Are we now supposed to be emulating the
lowest common denominator? Are we no longer striving to be the best?
manoj
--
The best way to keep your friends is not to give them away.
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/%7Esrivasta/>
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