Re: KDE

[Jules Bean <jmlb2@hermes.cam.ac.uk>]

On Tue, 9 Mar 1999, Jonathan P Tomer wrote:

> > What if we forbade "official" CD's from having any contrib/non-free
> > on them?  I.e., you could buy the Debian GNU/Linux distribution, which 
> > might be two CD's -- main-binary and main-source.  Then you could
> > purchase contrib/non-free CD's as separate entities.  They would
> > really only be "purchasable" for the convenience of the user (i.e., to 
> > avoid mega downloads).
> > 
> > I don't think this would really harm anyone -- the only thing in
> > non-free I use ATM is Netscape.
> 
> remember, contrib stuff is dfsg-free.

But not part of debian.

If it depends on non-free, then, as a whole, it's not free software.

> i see no point in making contrib any less accessible or less part of debian.
> the policy says that contrib also includes those things considered too buggy
> for support, but in practice all that ever gets in there are packages that
> depend on non-main packages. perhaps restricting non-free things from
> officialdom would be wise but restricting contrib is not fair to the authors
> of contrib software, who did nothing wrong except use non-free development
> tools which might well not be available elsewhere, (eg xforms).
> furthermore there is contrib stuff that depends only on non-*us* -- not
> non-free -- packages, and really is free.

That's a bug.  Such packages should be refiled.

Jules

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