Re: Another Non-Free Proposal
> > Uh, we're already doing that. Very few Debian resources are spent on
> > non-DFSG-free stuff. A single day's uploads takes more disk space and
> > bandwidth than the entirety of non-free. None of the regular maintenance
> > work is non-free specific.
On Mon, Jan 05, 2004 at 10:58:57AM -0500, Dale E Martin wrote:
> Yes, my point was that there would be little practical impact and you seem
> to agree with that in part.
There would be very little practical benefit to dropping non free.
That's not the same as saying that there would be very little practical
impact [unless you ignore the impact on the users, and on the people
who support non-free].
> > Which means the only resources we can "concentrate" are our servers, not
> > our developers' time, which means we get _no_ benefit from this, as far
> > as I can see.
>
> The only benefit anyone can argue is philosophical. (Well, see below for
> an actual practical benefit.) We have something called the DFSG, and we (as
> an organization, not as individuals necessarily) will only support software
> that conforms to the DFSG if we drop non-free.
Oddly enough, the DFSG was originally a part of the social contract.
Fundamentally: the social contract says that we're interested in
supporting users of free software, and the DFSG is the part which defines
what we mean by "free".
The philosophical benefit, I think, lies not in better understanding the
DFSG, but in other influences (perhaps, as someone else has indicated,
this is based on some of the writings published by the FSF -- but even
there, what people have been proposing is not very consistent with
those writings).
> > non-free maintainers have to setup their own archives,
>
> There are tons of those already, many in wide use. download.kde.org,
> backports.org, and the bunk backport collection all come to mind. I don't
> see this as big stumbling block.
Both of which represent far larger efforts than non-free.
Or is your point that you think non-free should be a larger effort?
> > contrib becomes at best much harder to support well and at worst
> > unsupported.
>
> The contrib issue is one that I have not mulled over too much. If we're
> interested in "moral purity" (which really is what this is about I think -
> as a project are we interested in it?), I suppose we'd ditch contrib too?
> That's a real sticky one.
Well... taking a statement written to be a practical best-effort at
describing how we work and turning it into a moral code and then using
that moral code to justify changing that original statement *is* sticky.
--
Raul
Reply to: