Re: Having a non-free and a non-cd branch?

[Igor Grobman <igor@igoria.net>]

Some time around  Sun, 28 Jun 1998 01:26:23 -0300, 
         Lalo Martins wrote:
 > On Jun 27, Igor Grobman decided to present us with:
 > > 
 > > Some time around  Sat, 27 Jun 1998 20:54:32 EDT, 
 > >          Dan Jacobowitz wrote:
 > >  > Actually, I think there would be merit to this.  The problem with
 > >  > shipping contrib on CDs is that by definition  contrib packages can
 > >  > depend on non-free packages - so basically, the CD does not contain
 > >  > every package depended on by other packages.  We can't always resolve
 > >  > that, but where we can, we should.
 > > 
 > > But we don't want to spend our efforts trying to separate the "cd-ok" pack
 > ages 
 > > only to find out later that whoever did the work did not do it well enough
 >  for 
 > > us not to get sued.
 > 
 > Effort? Just create a new dist that is non-free-but-CD-OK (maybe
 > the hardest part is coming up with a good name, but then contrib
 > already sucks). Next time a maintainer of a non-free package
 > wants to make an upload, this maintainer will likely _want_ to
 > check if the package is CD-OK, and then upload it to CD-OK
 > instead of non-free. That simple.
 

Well, let's see... how many packages James Troup found in main that weren't 
even close to DFSG compliant?  I can tell you that there were around a 100 (I 
might be exaggerating a little bit).  And this was done with some rigid 
guidelines present.  You are relying on the maintainers to decide if a license 
is "CD-OK" when they couldn't even interpret if it applies to DFSG?     

Now, I am sure someone can come 
up with definitions for "CD-OK" (if that's not effort, what is?), but will 
that definition hold up in court? we don't know.   You see, by creating a 
CD-OK distribution, we imply that we checked it to be ok, and may be legally 
liable for our decision in some countries.


Back to the point of this thread.  Even if we had a "CD-OK" distribution, we 
couldn't put it on official CD since that would go against our goals.  Why 
should we do it then?
-- 
Proudly running Debian Linux! Linux vs. Windows is a no-Win situation....
Igor Grobman           igor@debian.org                 igor@igoria.net 



--  
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-request@lists.debian.org
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org