Re: Debian Free Software (FSF) or Open Source? (was Re; non-cd...)

[Philip Hands <phil@hands.com>]

> 
> I apologise in advance for asking a stupid question. 
> 
> Suppose Acme Corp. wanted to package some commercial piece of software
> in a .deb so that Debian users could buy it. Assuming that they want
> money for each copy there's no way it would find its way into
> non-free, nor do I think it should; presumably they could sell a CD,
> or include it on their website or something. Would this contravene any
> of Debian's rules ?

Of course not.  They could make a CD set with all of Debian as well as their 
product, and their product if they liked.  That's one of the basic tenets of 
the Debian project, that others should be able to base their own distribution 
on it.  If the only difference between their distribution and ours is that 
they include one comercial package, and leave out parts of the distribution to 
make it fit on a CD, then that's completely fine (although in this case they 
should probably include the source for the debian binary packages they include)

I've been thinking that if we were to produce a W95 loader that allowed you to 
bring up debian from CD without installing much on the DOS disk or 
partitioning the disk, we might be able to persuade some games vendors to
write their games on Linux, and just include Linux with the game on the CD.
That way the would not have to worry about supporting more than one OS,
although we would need to make the graphics setup more automatic, but the
games folks probably know a lot more about that than we do.

Cheers, Phil.



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