Re: "keep non-free" proposal
On Sat, Mar 06, 2004 at 08:48:31AM +0100, Sven Luther wrote:
> Let's take two examples :
>
> netscape : it was in non-free a long time ago, and since the advance
> of mozilla and the other free browser, i believe it reached a point
> where we could sanely say that there is no use for the old netscape
> packages, and even that their continued existence posed a threat to
> security and such, and they could be removed. This maybe didn't happen
> as soon as it could have been, but it was because we didn't care
> enough, and because even the non-free removal advocate do care more
> aboure removing the word non-free from everything debian, than the
> actual freeness of the packages.
To iterate: I consider this as the prime example for the failure of the
'getting rid of non-free, because better Free alternatives exist now'
theory.
To the best of my knowledge, Netscape did *not* get removed because
'Mozilla/Konqueror/Galeon are better', but because 'Oops, we can't fix
that zlib bug and there is no upstream fix'.
If this means that we will have to wait for security issues for every
non-free program before you can get rid of it, we have just amended the
time-to-live for non-free considerably (cf. Eldred vs. Ashcroft).
Honest question: Did any unecessary/obsolete package get removed from
non-free since the beginning of this debate in november?
While you are always quick to point out that the non-free removal
advocates should come up with a transition plan/non-free.org, I
challenge that the keep non-free advocates should actively work on
removing non-free packages, at least that's what your proposal was
mainly about.
Michael
--
Michael Banck
Debian Developer
mbanck@debian.org
http://www.advogato.org/person/mbanck/diary.html
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