Re: What do you win by moving things to non-free?

[Glenn Maynard <glenn@zewt.org>]

On Mon, Apr 18, 2005 at 10:08:50AM -0300, Margarita Manterola wrote:
> How about having a new section, "open-source", or something, for the
> things that fall in the category described above?  (i.e. software that
> is _almost_ free, but has some small limitation over some freedom)

Debian is hard pressed to consistently distinguish "free" from "not free";
it doesn't seem like a practical use of time to have a "sort of free"
category in between.

That said, there have been discussions about ways to break down non-free
further, without necessarily creating new sections, eg.

  http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2005/04/msg00066.html

to allow, for example, CD vendors to more easily tell which parts of
non-free they can safely distribute without satisfying extra conditions.

> I know that having a new section would be a bit cumbersome, but I do
> feel that the mixture of different "freeness" in non-free is a bit
> unfair for those pieces of software that just fail a small point.

I don't believe "forbidden to be modified in any way" to be a "small point".

-- 
Glenn Maynard