Re: Seconded, sponsored. (was Re: General Resolution: Removing non-free)

[tb@MIT.EDU (Thomas Bushnell, BSG)]

Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au> writes:

> so ignore non-free. you don't have to dirty yourself with it if you
> don't want to. be as pure as you like, but don't force your "morality"
> on everyone else.

Currently there are three things that the current situation fails to
do correctly.  I would appreciate it if you could directly address
these three problems and describe the concrete steps you would like to
see taken to avoid them in the future.  If I heard some concrete ideas
for fixing these problems, my support for the GR would probably
vanish.

1) Currently many poeple (as evinced by this very flame war) think
   that non-free is part of Debian.  How can we prevent the average
   new user from getting this impression?  (One idea, for example,
   would be to include vrms by default on all new installations.  I'm
   not sure that's the right way to do it, but it's one thing that
   might work.)

2) Bugs in the interactions between main and non-free might hold up a
   release.  This should never be allowed to happen, a release of
   Debian should never have to wait for something in non-free.

3) We all agree that we should try to move to a place where non-free
   is necessary, I think: we all agree that non-free is an unfortunate
   reality; there are many things available only in non-free that are
   not in main which are important to many users (including, I repeat,
   me).  We should provide some kind of back-pressure to avoid the
   twin evils of author's releasing softare which is non-free
   ("because it doesn't really matter; Debian will take it anyway")
   and nobody taking the initiative to make the free alternatives
   really work ("because everyone can get the non-free one and it's
   good enough").

Thomas