Re: General Resolution: Removing non-free
On Thu, Jun 08, 2000 at 06:13:27PM +1000, Craig Sanders wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 07, 2000 at 04:30:03PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> > The one you've missed is:
> >
> > 4. Supporting non-free software gives nothing to Debian's users
> >
> > This is blatantly false. Netscape versus Mozilla, Sun/Blackdown JDK versus
> > Jikes/Kaffe, Pine versus Mutt, Info-Zip's zip/unzip versus minizip and
> > miniunzip, Qmail versus Exim or Postfix, xv versus imagemagick, tin versus
> > slrn. There're the things for which there aren't free replacements: lha,
> > zoo, arj, mmix-src, snes9x, SATAN, povray.
>
> while i agree in general with what you're saying, two specifics above
> give the false impression that the non-free alternative is better than
> the free. the first is "Pine versus Mutt" - mutt is heaps better than
> pine. second is "Qmail versus [...] Postfix" - postfix is better than
> qmail.
I haven't used postfix, but I feel obligated to point out (yet again) that
the only reason qmail isn't in main is because the author does not allow
modified binaries to be distributed, and insists on a particular directory
structure for binary distributions.
--Adam
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