Re: General Resolution: Removing non-free

[Stephen Frost <sfrost@mail.snowman.net>]

On Wed, 7 Jun 2000, Branden Robinson wrote:

> [NO NEED TO CC ME ON LIST MAIL]
> 
> On Wed, Jun 07, 2000 at 03:27:35PM +1000, Craig Sanders wrote:
> > non-free software doesn't need to be discriminated against (and changing
> > the rules & practices relating to non-free software after 4+ years is
> > discrimination), ignoring it is sufficient.
> 
> That's almost exactly what this proposal aims to do.  As it stands we pay a
> contribute a significant portion of our resources to the upkeep of non-free
> software.

	Non-free is about 1.6G
	main is about 13.6G
	contrib is about 500M
	Total is around: 16G

	So, around 10% is used for non-free.  I'd say that's borderling as to
if it is really 'significant'.  As for human-effort, I'm not sure that's very
easy to judge since people may or may not work on other packages were their
non-free packages removed.  Indeed they may just continue their efforts and
place them online for download elsewhere.
	Which brings up an interesting concern, without a central repository
allowing for easier dependancy tracking and maintenance we may end up with a
large number of packages just floating around.  I realize we aren't around to
gather up users, but I don't know that intentionally making things harder
for them (And perhaps not actually doing much productive at the same time) is
useful.

		Stephen