On Wed, Mar 10, 1999 at 09:33:00PM -0500, Phillip R. Jaenke wrote: > > I think Wichert is a little more reasonable than RMS in this area.. =p > > To be honest, I'm beginning to doubt RMS' reasoning skills period. *chuckle* I can see why you'd say that and sometimes I'm likely to agree, but believe it or not he DOES have his reasons and he has thought about them. > I'm in agreement. However, I'm in disagreement. I don't believe that we > should remove non-free packages from main ftp sites. Not in the least. > However, I think the *main* site for all the non-free packages should be > seperated. And not just non-free. Contrib as well. Remove, no. Move elsewhere on the site to make it clear that it's not part of debian/dists/potato for example, that's another matter (and one I would support...) RMS doesn't like it, but that's my opinion on the matter. > But this presents a naming scheme problem. Master.debian.org, > contrib.debian.org, non-free.debian.org. The last grates on me a great > deal. The more and more I think on this, non-free irritates me more and more. > WHY does it have to be non-free? It doesn't. It could be any number of things, not that I can think of a good name for it either right now. > I was working in dselect; forgot to install Apache for mrtg. ;P My boss, > who is watching, sees me select something necessary in non-free. Looks at > me, "is that commercial? What does it cost?" That's when you explain the DFSG to him. And why it's important. > Not everyone who's starting with Debian is familiar with the mentality. > Non-free could give a LOT of people the wrong idea. > > So, why does it have to be called non-free? It's free in the commercial > sense. And the majority of it is free to modify and use yourself. > (Redistribution of modified source/binaries really isn't that huge an > issue with me, to be honest. I'll just include a patch.) Actually, take xv as an example. That's shareware or something like that I think. I don't have it installed or I'd look. > So, I think perhaps our goal should not be to alienate non-free, nor to > embrace it. But to at least make some attempt to not only prevent further > confusion on the part of new users, but to attempt to make it better in > any way possible. Afterall, just because it's non-free now, doesn't mean > it won't be GPL down the road. We provide it as a service. Beyond that, I don't think we should really mess with it. -- Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@debian.org> Debian GNU/Linux developer PGP: E8D68481E3A8BB77 8EE22996C9445FBE The Source Comes First! To boldly go where no bunch of geeks have gone before :) --Joel Klecker
Attachment:
pgpCr8g7arM0v.pgp
Description: PGP signature