Re: non-free/contrib policy
On Sat, 19 Jul 1997, joost witteveen wrote:
> No, sharewere is excluded from main because it doens't follow the
> Debain Free Software guidelines (quoting from the main stuff:)
>
> 1.Free Redistribution
> The license of a Debian component may not restrict any party from
> selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate
> software distribution containing programs from several different
> sources. The license may not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.
>
> Obviously, shareware restricts selling/giving away (it restricts
> it to a certain period of time or whatever), so only by looking at
> "main", you (or at least I did) can see that a shareware packagre
Right. I should have realized that. That makes the parts of the policy
document (the current draft, and my comments on it) which say that
shareware go in contrib incorrect. Right? Shareware would have to go
in non-free. Right? Or would shareware be another exception to placing
all DFSG violators in non-free, as with lack of source code? Bruce?
> It is true, however that it is impossible to see whether a "free"
> non-us package can go into the Main distribution.
>
> Personally, I think it's a bit self-centered thinking of the
> US-debianers to exportability from the US such a central issue
> in determining wheter something can go into main or not. It'd
> be much better to have a "Main" archive that includes the non-us
> stuff, and provide an easy method for mirror administrators
> to "ln -s export-restriction-README $filename" the files that
> cannot be exported from that local mirror. That way, if the
> Dutch gouverment is going to prohibit exportation of compilers,
> and the French gouverment prohibits exportation of editors[1],
> we will be ready[2] for that.
I thought of that as I was writing my comments, and decided I
already had too many cans of worms open. However, now that you
mention it, my passing thoughts were:
It seems like the primary ftp site should be outside the U.S.
Then, the crypto stuff could be on it and everyone (both inside
and outside the U.S.) could download from it. Also, U.S. mirrors
could download from that site, and U.S. downloaders could download
from the mirrors. No more non-us split.
One problem with this might be legal concerns on the part of those
U.S. mirrors that someone located outside the U.S. would download
from them, and that might be seen as their "exporting" the material.
If that's a concern, the mirror could choose not to mirror the
crypto packages. There's probably few enough of those packages
that they could be removed by manual admin.
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