Chris Lawrence wrote:
>I think this is a perfectly sound proposal... once the software in
>non-free is substantially replaced by what we can distribute within
>Debian. This battle should be fought when we have a Mozilla that does
>everything Netscape does (and can be hosted on a US mirror... Mozilla
>is pretty worthless to me w/o SSL support), when we have an animation
And that doesn't open a separate window and burp 100's of error messages per page visit. One that accepts keyboard input out of the box... (every time I've toyed with Mozilla, it was the most worthless piece of garbage on the planet ranging from simply segfaulting all the way up to being able to visit pages with only mouse input... any time I've gotten it to run at all and for any length of time, it still hasn't had a single error-message free page)
>player that does everything xanim does, when we have a PDF viewer that
>does everything acroread does (IIRC, acroread is the only PDF viewer
>that supports finding text in documents), etc. Fighting it now will
>only hurt us and (if this proposal succeeds) our users, not to mention
>our image. Debian may not be a popularity contest (package
Why shouldn't it be? (No flames please... the group is already full enough with this stuff) We don't design OS's for moral concepts, we design them to be useful tools. Survival of the fittest plays a big role in computer-systems (MSFT not withstanding). Unfortunately such pettiness will if implemented kill Debian within a year or two. Argue or not I don't really care... the point is there aren't enough people with their priorities set on reimplementing these essential non-free items fast enough to keep Debian alive if at this point Debian were to say ok we don't like non-free and won't even provide a new Debian user with our ftp site to link into dpkg... go alien netscape from somewhere... (we will support you if you do this... that sounds like more work for Debian BTW). Netscape is huge... I don't want to download it... I want it on my CD... and yes... each and every Linux distro I buy to support the developers. Linux distros that package it all ARE worth the 60-80$ they charge.
To end this point on a semi-joking semi-serious note... Who's with me? Let's go reimplement Debian from scratch without this nonsense. They're just taking all the love out of it. Hmmm let's have a completely free (tolerant of non-free and free-alike) version of the Hurd!
>"popularity-contest" notwithstanding ;-), but we have better things to
>do with our time (like, um, releasing potato) than fighting among
>ourselves and pissing off users and potential users.
Definitely agreed.
>Chris
>--
>=============================================================================
>| Chris Lawrence | Get rid of Roger Wicker this year! |
>| <quango@watervalley.net> | http://www.lordsutch.com/ms-one/ |
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