Re: The "Free" vs. "Non-Free" issue
On 2004-01-01 15:10:32 +0000 Raul Miller <moth@magenta.com> wrote:
> > But please don't demand other people avoid non-free software if you're
> > not willing to solve their problems.
On Fri, Jan 02, 2004 at 07:45:25PM +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
> Are the people using the Debian infrastructure to support non-free
> helping to prevent the problems from being solved?
I don't believe that people are using non-free to prevent problems from
being solved. If they are, it would be good to know about.
> Already, someone has mentioned some Java packages that I think could
> be in Debian but aren't.
Are you talking about
http://lists.debian.org/debian-vote/2004/debian-vote-200401/msg00001.html?
Your 2:36PM followup to that message didn't really give any specifics
about why you thought some of those packages could go into main. For that
matter, you didn't even identify which packages you thought could be moved
(though you did say that tomcat irritated some users).
> Is that because contrib is an easy enough home for them?
Without knowing what you are talking about, it's hard for me to answer.
The most typical reason for things to be in non-free is that the copyright
terms don't allow us to fully support that piece of software.
The most typical reason for things to be in contrib is that the software
is mostly useless without some other component which we can't fully
support.
> If so, then removing non-free and contrib from our infrastructure would
> probably encourage them into Debian, solving one problem.
>
> I have two problems with this message. Firstly, I can't understand the
> repeated request that people who disagree with the use of non-free
> software do things to support it.
I don't understand what you are talking about here. Are you talking
about the package maintainers for non-free? If they don't want to
maintain those packages, no one is forcing them to.
Are you talking about other people? If so, it's not clear to me what
it is that they have to do to support non-free which they wouldn't have
to do even if non-free were not present.
Or are you talking about trivialities such as "they have to see the words
'non-free' when looking at the archives"?
> It is clearly harder to solve problems we don't
> (can't? won't?) experience: why don't the people who
> care want to do this work? Are they giving an unnecessary and
> difficult precondition?
I don't know what you are talking about, here.
> Secondly, I read this whole message, but didn't see a direct hook to a
> particular vote. Wouldn't it be better on -project or another more
> general list?
Yes, that would probably be better.
--
Raul
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