Re: Clarifications
Stephen Frost writes:
I have not had the time to read all the posts and probably everything
has been said many, many times. And repeated even more times. Maybe I
shouldn't post at all.
I've used Debian GNU/Linux since 1.2 and I am an active member of
Finnish Linux community. Debian is used by may employer, an important
Finnish organisation and many of my friends because of my
recommandation. I'm not a Debian developer because up to now I have
had nothing to package.
> sarcastic, and your claim that it is 'no more than miscellany' is false.
I agree. Non-free is quite important for many users - for example for
me. For example some graphic formats are patented in US where almost
anything can be patented but this is not so in many (most?) European
countries.
I feel that GNU/Linux is very much about a possibility to choose. If
non-free is removed Debian project limits it's users choice. It
doesn't hurt anybody to have non-free on ftp-sites but removing it
would make things more complicated. I guess everybody has heard what
KISS means?
> Or people will write installers for the non-free software, GPL them,
And all that time could be used to make useful free software.
> Perhaps we should attempt to educate our users instead of attempting
> to make their decisions for them.
What people seem to forget that there will always be non-free software
which cannot be replaced by free software. Always.
> > non-free, as it is not a part of the Debian system. And you fail to
> > recognize that getting non-free software elsewhere is trivially.
It may be trivial for you and me but it certainly isn't trivial for
Joe Luser.
> each package has to have someone maintaining it I would hazard a guess
> that at least a hundred people use non-free.
Thank you for making me laugh among this insanity.
> Non-free is not part of
> Offical Debian. Our developers and users use some parts of it, however,
> and so they use a designated area for their work. To tell our
> developers that they are no longer permitted to use this space is going
> to aggrevate them and may cause them to leave Debian as a whole. I do
> not believe the 'advantages' such that they are out-weight losing even
> one of our greatest assets and what Debian was *built* with, our
> developers.
If non-free is removed I honestly hope that Debian forks. That would
be a pity.
--
#!/usr/bin/perl -w -- Ari Makela <hauva@iki.fi> - http://www.iki.fi/hauva/
use strict;my $j=Japh->new();$j->print();package Japh;sub new{my $c=shift;
my $s={j=>'rekcaH lreP rehtonA tsuJ'};bless $s,$c;return $s;}sub print{my
$s=shift;$s->{j}=reverse($s->{j});print $s->{j},"\n";}1;
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