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Re: sharefont package license sucks, even for non-free



On Fri, Nov 03, 2000 at 11:51:36AM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote:
> > Should Debian resources be used to make a buck for maintainers?
> 
> No.
> 
> > Do we need policy against this sort of thing?
> 
> Yes.
> 
> What's more, any money that o-o makes from this half-baked enterprise will
> probably be used to put people on URPE spam lists.  (Unsolicited Religious
> Proselytizing Email).

It's a bit more complicated. o-o is upstream maintainer here, too. Usually,
we *encourage* upstream maintainers to package and maintain their software
for Debian. Now, with non-free, a paradox situation arises: An author of
shareware could join Debian and package it for Debian, and Debian would help
distributing his for-profit ware all over the world.

The only logical conclusion is to (<agenda>drop non-free or</agenda>)
disallow shareware in non-free. IMHO not a too bad idea anyway. A lot of
people pointed out that there are different license types in non-free, and
shareware is one of those not too close to free software after all.

Thanks,
Marcus

-- 
`Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org brinkmd@debian.org
Marcus Brinkmann              GNU    http://www.gnu.org    marcus@gnu.org
Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de
http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de



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