On Mon, Nov 13, 2006 at 09:33:08AM +0100, Miriam Ruiz wrote: > Hi, Hi, > I'm sorry for being so inactive now, I've just moved house and I don't have a > connection from there yer, I hope to be back ASAP. I've been quite busy with other things myself, and will be for some time. I hope to get active again in some months. > BTW, I'm having some thoughts about something lately. I started to package > descent for Linux, until I realized that there was no way to easily have a > free world to play with, nor free editors to create it, so I stopped. A > couple of friends of mine told me that I should package it anyway (contrib) > because we had users who had bought those games (thus, had the world data) > and wanted to play them from Debian. Do you think we should support those > users? That's the classical free software versus users priority problem. :-) Personally, I support users of free software. For me, the only reason I don't object to Debian doing non-free stuff is that it might "lure" users to free software. I don't see any value in people using non-free software, except as a means to get them to use free software. And since I'm not so sure if it actually works that way, I'm not going to spend my time on it. But I don't object to others doing that. > I'm quite reluctant to spending my time in non-free stuff but what they say > might have some sense. IMO doing things with non-free software is only worth it if there are people who want to do them. That is, if you don't personally want to do it, then don't do it for others. If you want to help others, your time is better spent on free software. Well, that's my opinion, of course, and from the fact that there is a contrib and non-free section at all, it's clear that not everybody agrees. :-) I'd advise you to do what feels good for you. From your words, I think that means don't do non-free things. > Another point, I've already talked with some of you about some games coded > in D (like Kenta Cho's). There's no free D compiler package in Debian, > although in the future we might have gdc, or even D integrated into gcc, who > knows. For the moment, as those games are free but their building chain is > not, they might be suitable for contrib (afaik). What do you think? A similar situation, with a similar reasoning: Let the people who care about it (that is, want to use it themselves) do it. If that's you, go for it. If not, tell others (which you just did) and do other things. :-) Of course if you want those games to be really free, you can also try to get some free D compiler into Debian (possibly creating it first if it doesn't exist). Thanks, Bas -- I encourage people to send encrypted e-mail (see http://www.gnupg.org). If you have problems reading my e-mail, use a better reader. Please send the central message of e-mails as plain text in the message body, not as HTML and definitely not as MS Word. Please do not use the MS Word format for attachments either. For more information, see http://pcbcn10.phys.rug.nl/e-mail.html
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