On Thu, Aug 20, 1998 at 12:56:55AM -0700, Joey Hess wrote: > Those who don't want to work on non-free are welcome not to. There are > packages in non-free that have no counterpart in main. Non-frees that I can live without: xanim freefont Non-frees that I cannot live without at this time: libmagick4g-lzw[1] navigator4-smotif netscape4-base netscape4-java pgp-us ssh Non-frees that I choose to have installed though I don't -NEED- them: distributed-net amp mikmod[2] mpg123 rar[3] [1] I consider imagemagick crippled without GIF support and have made extensive use of this new toy the past week or so.. Within 20 min of playing I decided to forever purge xv which is very very non-free. only thing that makes imagemagick non-free is the optional LZW library which I personally want to keep. [2] This is actually free in 3.x, though Debian has only 2.14, I have a 3.x copy I use locally as often as I use the old 2.14 version. Still waiting on the maintainer to package the free version which was AFAIK out in time for hamm if I had known about it.. =p [3] rar is not so much an issue other than that in my OS/2 days it was the best archiver I had and a few of my CDRs which I haven't replaced have rar archives. I may see about replacing this non-free package with the "unrar" program which is all I need. Can debian do without non-free? Not yet. ssh and pgp are too important, even though they're in non-us. Can users do without non-free? Probably not. All of the multimedia apps are crippled in that some dumbasses thinks patents on file formats or mathematical formulae are reasonable. (apology for the language, but I really think it seems fitting, all considered.)
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