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Re: Ask yourself some questions (was: Discussion - non-free software removal)



On Thu, Nov 14, 2002 at 12:13:46AM -0600, Scott Dier wrote:
> On Wed, 2002-11-13 at 14:19, Branden Robinson wrote:
> > Does Debian have the right to decide whether or not to terminate a
> > service?  Does the service belong to Debian, or must it remain forever,
> > as a public entitlement, completely irrelevant of the level of desire of
> > the public to use it?
> 
> Or, is this actually the most compelling argument in the mass of knots
> above?  Is this about users?  Is this about getting packages to apt-get
> install painlessly?  Is this about bandwidth?  Is this about disk
> space?  Or is this about skilled peoples time being wasted on
> maintaining another infrastructure for non-free software?

I imagine all of these factors are part of the equation that each of us
will solve for ourselves when this GR goes to a vote.

All we are really doing in this discussion is attempting to influence
the weighting multipliers we each apply to each term of the equation.

> We might all have, individually, a small percentage of installed
> applications when using vrms... However, the combination of all users
> most likely cover a wide range of requirements.

I find the term "requirements" more persuasive when applied to packages
like graphviz than to stuff like angband and bsdgames-nonfree.

> This range of requirements, coupled with the resource saving of using
> existing infrastructure could easily enough justify the opinion:
> Wasting skilled developer time on maintaining a secondary

How wasteful can it be, if it's worth doing?

> infrastructure for non-free software is possibly detrimental to Free
> software development and the *human* resources of the project as a
> whole.

I don't see how that necessarily follows.  The speculation that some
people will just stop spending time fooling with stuff like angband is
also plausible.

(Hey, for all I know angband is a great game, but it's hard for me to
conceive of it as mission-critical to anyone.)

-- 
G. Branden Robinson                |       The last Christian died on the
Debian GNU/Linux                   |       cross.
branden@debian.org                 |       -- Friedrich Nietzsche
http://people.debian.org/~branden/ |

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