> There would be very little practical benefit to dropping non free. Yes, we agree there. > 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]. Let's spell it out: Benefits -------- - Perceived philosophical benefit in supporting only DFSG compliant software as a project. - Small reduction in bandwidth, disk space, and cpu cycles on project's servers. - Potential marketing benefit due to being "blessed" by the FSF. (Some contend this would be temporary due to the finicky nature of the FSF leadership.) Costs ----- - Alienation of users who find changing their sources.list to be problematic. - Alienation of users who think that we've violated their trust by changing the social contract mid-game. - Increased effort on the part of developers who maintain non-free stuff due to th need for a parallel infrastructure - servers, webpages, bandwidth, bts, mailing lists, and maintenance of those services. - WTF to do with contrib? Feel free to add to either list. I almost put "loss of functionality such as support for certain hardware, japanese pdf readers" but technically Debian does not contain those now. > > 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? No, my point was that there are Debian developers already willing to maintain parallel infrastructure on or above the level that would be required by nonfree.org, so on the surface this doesn't seem like a showstopper. On the other hand, I'm not volunteering so apparently I'm not allowed to say that ;-) Later, Dale -- Dale E. Martin, Clifton Labs, Inc. Senior Computer Engineer dmartin@cliftonlabs.com http://www.cliftonlabs.com pgp key available
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