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Re: General Resolution: Removing non-free



On Thu, Jun 08, 2000 at 12:14:13AM +0100, Julian Gilbey wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 07, 2000 at 06:51:44PM -0400, Ben Collins wrote:
> > No, it would be like a Health Store that sold normal food because they
> > needed to support it since there were no alternative Healthy foods
> > available at the time. Then after some time, that Health Food store
> > decided to get rid of those Non-Healthy foods since Health Food became
> > very popular and had good alternatives to those unhealthy foods. :)
> 
> So if you follow those arguments, remove the packages that have
> good, at-least-equally functional free replacements from non-free,
> and leave the ones which don't.

That was not my argument, just a comment to an anology. I'm personally
against having such things in Debian simply because there isn't a
replacement. In fact, I believe that giving them a non-free alternative
makes people less likely to test and help with a free alternative. Just
look at the KDE/QT2 license issue. Someone wants it in Debian so bad they
are willing to pay KDE to make the appropriate changes. Now you could
argue this is a legal issue, or some will argue it is a moral one. Either
way, our stand seems to be making waves.

Don't you think taking a stand for what is morally right is more important
than a legal issue? If yes, then the KDE problem is of less significance
than the non-free one, and we should take a bigger stand.

Ben

-- 
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/  Ben Collins  --  ...on that fantastic voyage...  --  Debian GNU/Linux   \
`  bcollins@debian.org  --  bcollins@openldap.org  --  bcollins@linux.com  '
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