Re: non-free software
Hello
Thanks for the prompt reply!
May I suggest that you might make a non-free_1 and
non-free_2 directory. The non-free_1 directory would
contain software for which there is no possible legal
liability for the cdrom vendor and cdrom vendors would
be encouraged to include. The directory non-free_2
would contain packages with more restrictive licenses.B
Some of stuff in non-free is, in my opinion, rather basic and
cdrom vendors should be encouraged to include it. Especially
since other vendors include it with their distribution.
King Lee
king@ultrix6.cs.csubak.edu
On Mon, 30 Mar 1998, Bob Hilliard wrote:
> King Lee <king@ultrix6.cs.csubak.edu> writes:
> > I have just installed debian from cdrom (infomagic),
> > and some of my favorite packages, available
> > on Red Hat, are missing from the Debian
> > distribution. These packages (netpbm , xv) are in the non-free
> > subdirectory of packages in www.debian.org, but in the distributions
> > available on cdroms ( I checked other cdroms).
> >
> > I understand there may be restrictions on distributions of some
> > packages, but if others can include it why cannot Debian? Debian
> > seems to have the larger of packages than other distributions
> > but they are missing some rather basic packages?
>
> This illustrates a point I was planing to bring up for discussion
> on debian-devel. The Debian Social Contract, referring to the contrib
> and non-free, says "We encourage CD manufacturers to read the licenses
> of software packages in these directories and determine if they can
> distribute that software on their CDs.
>
> Prior to the "Official CD", some vendors, such as CheapBytes,
> included substantial parts of non-free on their CDs while others,
> including Infomagic, ignored non-free. Since we made the "Official
> CD" available with the bo release, all CD vendors seem to have taken
> the path of least resistance, and reproduced the "Official CD" as is.
>
> The "Official CD" is a Good Thing (TM), but this side effect is a
> Bad Thing (TM). I would like to see someone come up with a way to
> persuade vendors to include as much of non-free as possible, while
> still issuing the "Official CD". One possibility is to include the
> non-free directory in the "Official CD" image, and point the vendors
> to a statement similar to that in the Social Contract.
>
> Bob
> --
> _
> |_) _ |_ Robert D. Hilliard <hilliard@metrolink.net>
> |_) (_) |_) Palm City, FL USA PGP Key ID: A8E40EB9
>
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