Re: General Resolution: Removing non-free
On Wed, Jun 07, 2000 at 10:33:00AM -0400, Buddha Buck wrote:
> From: Branden Robinson [mailto:branden@ecn.purdue.edu]
> > It is a largely technical proposal with some alterations to the Social
> > Contract to clear up some muddy language and terminate a
> > compromise that was made years ago for pragmatic reasons.
>
> As I understand it, this is the first resolution to alter the Social
> Contract since it was created 4+ years ago. That alone makes it a largely
> political proposal.
Let me put a totally off-the-wall view on this:
As a legal contract, don't all parties involved have to initial any
changes? The contract is offered from the Debian Project to the community.
Shouldn't the community have a say in any change to that contract?
As a non-developer (my application is probably lost somewhere in the old
queue) I see this resolution as highly divisive, with very little net
benefit at this time. I have failed to see any convincing argument from
Mr Robinson.
I do agree that non-free is an evil. It's a necessary compromise, and
should remain until there are complete replacements which are
DFSG-compliant for all of the packages in non-free.
If someone's gone to the bother of packaging non-free software, it follows
that they (and others) find that software useful, and prefer the
convenience (distributions are all about convenience and consistency) of
having that available in a central archive.
--
Paul Martin <pm@zetnet.net>
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