Re: Status of Debian Policy
On Mon, 16 Jun 1997, Santiago Vila Doncel wrote:
> On Sun, 15 Jun 1997, Christian Schwarz wrote:
>
> > TOPIC 7: new definition of ``free software''
>
> This is only about the "main" section.
>
> In addition to that, I wonder why we are supporting this packages in the
> `contrib' section:
>
> * whose copyright permission notices (or patent problems) allow only
> distribution of compiled binaries (and thus of which only binaries
> are available)
> * allow free use only for a trial period (shareware)
> * are demonstration programs lacking vital functionality
> (crippleware)
>
> Are there many of them?
In "bo" we had 33 of contrib packages. The reason for this is that due to
the lack of source we are not able to fix any bugs in that package or to
adopt the package to our needs (cf. discussion of file locking). If the
package is only useable for a trial period, we can't put it into the main
distribution since we would not allow a package to depend on such a
package.
And we seperate these packages from non-free since that section should be
as small as possible to simplify the work necessary for CD vendors.
I think the splitting into "main", "non-free", "contrib" (and "non-us") is
quite reasonable and need not be changed in the near future.
Thanks,
Chris
-- Christian Schwarz
schwarz@monet.m.isar.de, schwarz@schwarz-online.com,
Debian is looking schwarz@debian.org, schwarz@mathematik.tu-muenchen.de
for a logo! Have a
look at our drafts PGP-fp: 8F 61 EB 6D CF 23 CA D7 34 05 14 5C C8 DC 22 BA
at http://fatman.mathematik.tu-muenchen.de/~schwarz/debian-logo/
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