Re: "keep non-free" proposal
On Tue, Mar 09, 2004 at 06:50:35PM -0800, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:
> I think that's a decent objective. But we have historically had
> things in non-free even when we did have alternatives. Things that go
> in main have to meet the DFSG, and the maintainers say-so is not
> enough to satisfy that things have. There is independent review, from
> the FTP masters and debian-legal about such things.
Yeah, but since non-free has been mostly abandoned, this is more a by
product of the relative unimportance of non-free than a deliberative
will.
It takes time and effort to go over non-free and purge packages from
there, time and effort i suspect the non-free maintainers don't care
about, wanting to limit their involvement with only the strict
necessary, that is their package, the opponene of non-free won't even
look at it, and the ftp-master find non-free to be too insignificant to
look at in detail.
> So I would like to see non-free (if it remains) have a requirement
> that things be necessary, or only there in the absence of free
> alternatives, or something like that; and I think such a requirement
> should be enforced by more than the maintainer's say-so.
But we already have the possibility to do this. The technical comitte
has the power to override the maintainers decision, it is just that upto
now, nobody cared enough to take the steps needed to make this happen.
But still, we have to stay balanced, it is not only the maintainer who
has to say so, but he should also have its word to say, and just a let's
remove foo, because bar in main is equivalent, without really
argumenting about this, is not enough.
Also, you will have to compare on many things :
1) functionality, including interface with other programs.
2) relative freedom of the licence, and hopes of future change.
3) cleanliness of the code base, and bug level.
4) activity of upstream, and degree of followup and maintainership.
Well, there may be other issues, but i guess these are the most
important ones.
> > Instead, you're implying that people will feel more pressured by the
> > absense of non-free and will therefore they will fix the problems such
> > that [2] will cease to be an issue.
>
> No, that's not really what I'm doing. I hope that non-free.org would
> exist, and I would hope that the Debian packages now in non-free would
> find a home there. I would hope that users learn how to add the right
> apt-get line for it, just as they must learn to add non-free now.
Well, you see the difference. I hope that some day, not so far away as
aj said, non-free would be empty, or at least that the duration of
packages in there would be rather small.
> Right now, the standards for main and contrib are very rigid and
> fairly precise, but we have in practice allowed for some flexibility
> around the timing of things (for example, the current lengthy delay in
Yeah, but these flexibility is dependent of the upstream author. We
delayed only because it is the FSF, if it was anyone else ...
> I don't view non-free as a wonderful tool for dealing with "licensing
> problems". Indeed, I would guess that we have been hampered by having
> upstream people say "well, we shouldn't make it free, after all,
> you'll still distribute it". I don't think that helps at all; if my
Please tell me, of all packages in non-free, which one you know upstream
to have said that.
> I believe that we need to send the message to upstream authors that we
> stand for free software, and it is not our job to help them with
> non-free software. Where this is tricky is in helping our *users*
Yeah, but then again, i believe, and i know from experience, that you
can get the same message aroudn while still having the package in
non-free. After all, the fact that the package doesn't go on the CD set
is problematic enough, and we can make it clearer that the non-free
packages are there, on probe, for a limited time, until either they
change their mind, or a free replacement is found.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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