John Goerzen wrote:
> In the short term, that is true; but over the long term, I believe that it
> will not hold.
I agree. Over the long-term, the cost of investment in an alternate
approach will diminsh. It will not go away compared to keeping
non-free on the Debian mirrors, and the short-term cost is very high.
> One benefit we can see by separating it from Debian is that people that
> would not work on Debian or Free Software anyway would be able to work on
> non-free, which could help free up resources for our core projects.
As a data point of 1 and thus speaking for no others:
I work extensively with free software. I've authored several important
software systems for which there is no commercial counterpart. I have
a half-dozen web sites distributing various DFSG-compliant source code
packages that I wrote. I maintain a web log devoted to Debian and
open-source Lisp software (http://b9.com). I work as an AM for
Debian. I've recently installed my 7th architecture on which to test
current and future Debian packages.
Yet, non-free software is important to me. I depend on some of these
packages and the other packages in non-free cause me no trouble.
Rather than people from Microsoft, Adobe, or Oracle popping up to
handle an alternative non-free distribution for Debian, I believe it
will be DD like myself who would work on such a parallel distribution
and would reduce resources for core Debian projects.
--
Kevin Rosenberg | .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux **
http://b9.com/debian.html | : :' : The universal
GPG signed and encrypted | `. `' Operating System
messages accepted. | `- http://www.debian.org/
Attachment:
pgpddOZ1XdLkv.pgp
Description: PGP signature