Re: Debian Weekly News - June 27th, 2000
On Thu, Jun 29, 2000 at 04:48:48PM +0200, pseelig@debian.org wrote:
> Consider this: any reasonable person who would like to package
> non-free software for Debian simply *can't* because we don't allow him
> to do so even for Debian non-free. KDE is an example for which other
> distributions are less prohibitive.
>
> Yes, i know about the legal problems regarding KDE, but Debian should
> IMHO be not the legal guardian for other people's right if they don't
> bother to stand up for it. The parties which have been harmed by
> breaking their rights should.
You misunderstand. We would be the ones infringing those authors'
rights if we distributed binary packages. We distribute Qt, and the GPL
exemption clause won't allow us to distribute both KDE and Qt together
if we want the exemption.
The fact is that the KDE people don't seem to want to fix it. On
principle, we shouldn't support them. If they fix the problem,
I expect we would see official Debian packages of KDE within days.
> IMHO you got it completely backwards. The perspective under which the
> idea of such a kind of repository arose is probably product of the
> licensing restrictions which make Debian less attractive and useful
> than it could actually be for quite a number of *users*. Users have a
What makes you think things not suitable for non-free are suitable
for some other repository? You're suggesting a site full of
illegal .deb packages! Go ahead and do that if you want to,
but it seems like a pretty dumb thing to do.
Any package legally allowed in non-free will be accepted. Any package
legally not allowed in non-free probably can't be distributed elsewhere
either.
> is not allowed into Debian. The creation of such a repository is
> their way to react against the obvious censoring of software included
> with Debian.
Censorship? Where? The `data' section is the answer to some things
which you may think are missing (not implemented yet). What else?
As far as I know, we have the offensive purity tests, bible etc.
I support Debian supporting non-free. But count me out of your
illegal software distribution site!
Hamish
--
Hamish Moffatt VK3SB <hamish@debian.org> <hamish@cloud.net.au>
Reply to: