Re: General Resolution: Removing non-free, Draft 2

[Daniel Burrows <Daniel_Burrows@brown.edu>]

  (I'm not a Debian developer, so I can probably be safely ignored..)

On Wed, Jun 07, 2000 at 02:25:03AM -0500, John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> was heard to say:
> The title of Section 5 shall be modified to read: "We will support users of
> our system who develop or run non-free software."

  I fail to see how saying "you're completely on your own if you want to run
non-free software" counts as "support".  Sure, people can go out and get the
software themselves, but that's not exactly "support" from Debian.  If I wanted
to install my whole system (currently over a thousand packages) by hand and
keep it up to date manually I'd still be using Slackware.

  Personally this won't affect me much if at all, as I use very little software
from non-free.  However, I still feel that the following additional change
should be made to preserve self-consistency of the document:

  Section 4 should be modified to read:
4) Our Priority is Free Software

  We will be guided by the needs of the free-software community.  We will
place their interests first in our priorities.  We will support the needs of
our users for operation across diverse hardware platforms.  We will allow
others to create value-added distributions containing both Debian and
commercial software, without any fee from us.  To support these goals, we will
provide an integrated system of high-quality, 100% free software, with no
legal restrictions that would prevent these kinds of use.

  Daniel