Re: GNU Win32? Not anymore.
> I've read this document, and the Social Contract, though I missed
> the discussion and vote by being unsubscribed at the time.
>
> I've just spent several hours searching through the debian-devel
> list archives for the discussion & vote thread (it took so long
> because I'm at the end of a long, slow, and unreliable link).
> I searched for "vote", "free software", "non-free", and "social
> contract", without finding the discussion and vote thread.
It took place on debian-private and as Bruce correctly mentioned,
it is too bad some of us weren't suscribed at that time.
And I completely agree with you. What's the purpose of having main,
contrib, and non-free areas in the first place? I thought not because
we had guidelines on what to put in there but to serve some user and
vendor needs.
Alex Y.
>
> I'm not disputing that the discussion & vote took place, but I
> just have not been able to find the thread in the archives so as
> to inform myself of the details.
>
> The specific detail I'm after is whether the discussion & vote
> involved both "free software" in the Free Software Guidelinse
> sense, and the "non-free" area of the ftp sites. What was or was
> not said about a relationship (or lack thereof) between these two?
>
> I suspect, as must be clear from my earlier posts, that there
> is an unhappy coincidence here of too-similar names for two
> different things.
>
> The "non-free" area was originally created specifically to hold
> packages which had copyright restrictions which precluded their
> being picked up and distributed by a for-profit CD manufacturer
> without first obtaining permission from the copyright holders --
> on a package-by-package basis. It had a very specialzed purpose --
> allowing CD manufacturers to exclude software which had copyright
> problems for them by simply not picking up the "non-free" area.
> ("non-free", IMO, was and is an unfortunate name for this area)
>
> Packages which had no copyright problem with for-profit
> distribution but which had some other problem which disqualified
> them from the mainline Debian distribution would go in the
> "contrib" area which is clearly identified along with the
> "non-free" area in the Social Contract as containing software which
> is not part of the Debian system. The packages in "contrib",
> though, are distributable by for-profit CD manufacturers --
> that's what distinguishes them from the programs in "non-free".
> ("contrib", IMO, isn't an ideal name here either)
>
> The Debian Policy Manual, version 2.2.0.0, 13 July 1997, released
> just yesterday, seems to confirm my understanding of the "non-free"
> and "contrib" areas.
>
> And, since this is on the Win32 thread, I'll mention again that
> (at least as I understand the License restriction issue) Win32
> should go in "contrib", not "non-free"; according to my understanding
> of the purposes and usages of those areas.
--
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| _ 7 | Alexander Yukhimets aqy6633@is5.nyu.edu |
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