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/
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