Re: Discussion - non-free software removal
On Tue, 2002-11-12 at 19:58, John Goerzen wrote:
> NON-FREE IS NOT IN DEBIAN NOW.
Of course, non-free does a massive amount of infrastructure sharing. I
fear, along with others voiced on this list, that the total 'drain' on
people who need to:
A) Put food on table
B) Need to administrate modern and complete machines
who require centralized archives and management of stability will be
forced to spend time on maintaining a seperate infrastrcuture that is
non-trivial. I'm going to have to do a good look at what software my
users use and figure out how much time this is really going to take out
of my limited time at work. More time I have to work on archive crap to
make sure my users have the sofware they want is less time I have (out
of very limited time anyhow) to work on free software.
This is really great and all to try and make non-free software less
desirable to users, but at what cost?
I use debian on a good number (3 figure) of machines becuase it is
manageable and saves me time. This proposal is easily threatining to
require myself to spend more time creating a unified archive of software
that we require. I work with Faculty and Researchers who could care
less about what sort of non-free license is in play, just that the
software is readily avaliable and legal to use in their paticular
situation.
I'm not convinced that this GR is going to be for the best of many
systems adminstrators like myself. Future stable revisions could easily
be much less useful to scads of people and really 'harm the cause' more
than anything. This is all a necessary evil of project resource use, i
think, as it really does free up some classes of people to work on
better things.
Lastly, as someone who helps sponsor bandwidth for a mirror server, we
have never recieved a complaint about the non-free archive and the
bandwidth provided to transfer contents of that archive.
--
Scott Dier <dieman@ringworld.org> KC0OBS http://www.ringworld.org/
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