Re: General Resolution: Removing non-free, Draft 2

[Francesco Tapparo <ftapparo@ntt.it>]

On Thu, Jun 08, 2000 at 10:53:55AM -0400, Michael Stone wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 08, 2000 at 04:13:04PM +0200, Francesco Tapparo wrote:
> > I think you're forgetting something: it is not common to download the debian
> > packages. The vast majority of the people have only a modem connection, so
> > upgrade debian with an apt to ftp.debian.org is out of discussion.
> > The majority of the people simply buy the cd. The contents of the CD is
> 
> Do you really have numbers to back up that claim, or are you making it
> up? In my area, *no one* buys a cd and *all* installs are done over the
> net. I am not so arrogant as to proclaim that this is true for all
> debian users.


Of course I've not numbers to back up my claim: nobody has them!
You say in your area *no one* buys a cd: it is a strong claim! Do you have
numbers to back up your claim?
I think not.
Do you are arrogant?
No.
We are simply reasoning and evidently coming to a different conclusion.

My reasoning is the following:

In Europe upgrade with apt is really impractical (for the reason explained
in the rest of this subthread).
In the USA it is economically feasible, but it need a lot of time of
download. A cd is much more practical anyway.
There are a lot of nations without a good net infrastructure.

Note that the existence of linux magazines with one or two cd of linux
software denote the existence of a strong market asking for cd. This is not
compatible with a situation where the majority of the users download the
software through the net.


I would like to add that all the users using apt must simply add an entry to
theur sources file. Of course this does not scale to a great number of
non-free packages (unless soeone build a central repository), but I suspect
that very few people use all the non-free packages: they use the
non-free packages they need and then they use main.
 
> -- 
> Mike Stone

cheers

PS: please keep a moderate tone when replying. Please read the headers,
too. You've mistaked other people supporting my point with me, and you've
insulted them, too. 

-- 
Francesco Tapparo				 |	cesco@debian.org
fight for your software freedoms: www.fsf.org    |      tapparo@mat.unimi.it