Re: "keep non-free" proposal
On Sat, Mar 06, 2004 at 01:48:39AM -0800, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:
> Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr> writes:
>
> > But if you would have read the rest of my post, or my other mails, you
> > would know that i advocate a case by case schedule for this to happen.
>
> I don't understand. I'm asking "when is it appropriate to shut down
> support for the non-free archive on Debian". Is your answer "when the
> last packages is removed from it"?
Yes, naturally.
In the mouth of our ftp-masters, the cost of maintaining it is not huge,
and not problematic, in any case less than the energy needed to maintain
a non-free alternate repository.
But i see non-free asa stagging area, where packages are on the probe.
They are there because they are useful, because there is not yet a free
alternative, or because we are in discussion with upstream over a
licence change, and believe that they might be moved to change it in the
near future, and that having the package in non-free might show them the
benefit of having them in debian.
If however, upstream shows unwilling to change the licence, then we can
work on a free alternative, and once a free alternative is there, remove
the package from the non-free part of our archive. Or if it is clear
that upstream is not going to change, have the possibility to remove it
from our archive in retaliation (as is the case with the adobe package
Branden mentioned a few weeks ago).
This is something we have not been doing, majorly because nobody really
cares about the non-free packages, and because those who care about
non-free, care more about appareances and words than about reality. Do
you really believe having a non-free archive on the debian
infrastructure is in any way different than having a separate
non-free.org archive ? What does it change in the long run ? And if
anything you care about is the confusion, by all means, have a DNS magic
thingy point non-free.org to debian/non-free and be done with it.
> (But would you really be happy having it shut down? Suppose two weeks
> later some "necessary" non-free package appears: would you want to
> recreate the non-free archive?)
I guess my above explanation responds to this.
> > Do you seriously think that having java packages in non-free or not
> > would have made any influence on the progress of alternative packages ?
>
> I don't have any beliefs either way on the question. My concern is
> that Debian should be free software, for the sake of clarity if
And, what do you think of people who need to run 3D graphics, or need to
run java ? They will go to apt-get.org, which is as debian as it can be,
isn't it, carrying the apt-gte name, and download the third party
package. Or go to non-free and use it, or go to non-free.org and get it.
In how far does this improve the freeness of debian for these users ?
And the hypocricy of it all, clamoring that we want debian to be 100%
non-free, and not willing to take an active stance again the non-free
binary-only hardware drivers, even suggesting to encourage third party
to provide packages for these, in a non-free.org archive debian people
will set up and maintain. I also see the shadow of third parties
advocating this, which may have vested interest in this also, and not so
much in debian (and all debian installed systems) to be non-free, but to
get a personal benefit from it, through the added-value they will thus
provide.
> nothing else. You have already described the current state as one in
> which non-free is part of Debian--indicating that the compromise
> position we thought we had has more or less entirely broken down.
> Anthony Towns as well has now said that the compromise is meaningless.
Yeah, and ? Do you really think this may change once non-free is moved
to non-free.org ? Please be serious.
> In which case, it's gone. We currently have a distribution which is
> not 100% Free Software, as our contract promised. We should fix that.
And, you conveniently forget about section 5 of our social contract,
which you agreed to when you became a debian maintainer, and now that
you don't need netscape anymore or whatever other non-free package, you
want to get ride of it.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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