Re: The "Free" vs. "Non-Free" issue
On Tue, 06 Jan 2004 12:23:01 +0000, MJ Ray <mjr@dsl.pipex.com> said:
> On 2004-01-05 17:48:50 +0000 Oliver Elphick <olly@lfix.co.uk> wrote:
>> We have a commitment to maintain it as long as it is needed (social
>> contract) and we should abide by that commitment; not chop and
>> change for ideological reasons.
> What is the temporal scope of our social contract? Current and past
> releases? That and the release under development? Forever? If
> forever, did the project's aims and methods get fixed in stone when
> it was issued? Why is there a way to change it in the constitution?
If you mean dropping promised support with no transition, then
forever. If you want to effect changes, you need to at least pretend
to minimize the impact on people depoending on the saupport -- a
transition plan, trying to find alternative support paths for the
user.
>> [...] I don't think that would be any better morally than a
>> commercial firm's decision to abandon support for a product which
>> was not sufficiently profitable.
> Would anyone argue that orphaning or deleting individual packages
> was immoral? That happens already.
Do these individual packages have active, responsive
develpers, and a user community that is engaged? If so (though I
rarely bandy around words like "immoral"), yes, that would have been
wrong too.
>> In the end, reliability and loyalty to our users are a lot more
>> important than ideological purity.
> The "reliability and loyalty" case for non-free is dubious, as we
> can't properly test, verify or repair some of it.
Why is it dubious? Because you say so? How is it any less
testable than the utility of Debian as a whole?
>> The reason for providing non-free is just the same as it ever was:
>> for the convenience of users who want to use Debian and also need
>> to use packages that do not meet DFSG requirements.
> I think this could probably be done better by improvements in
> support for packages not in the Debian archive, like the Origin and
> Bugs fields.
>> Any user who doesn't like non-free can simply exclude it from his
>> sources.list.
> Are developers who will not agree to use non-free blocked from jobs
> where they ought to deal with it? Are there such jobs?
Huh?
>> The time to get rid of non-free is when it no longer has any
>> maintained packages; not until then.
> Will that ever happen? Will non-free packagers work towards this?
When there is no need for the non-free packages, the packagers
shall desist.
manoj
--
"The knack of flying is learning how to throw yourself at the ground
and miss." Hitchhiker's
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/%7Esrivasta/>
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