Hi, On Thu, Nov 14, 2002 at 01:53:44AM -0500, Branden Robinson wrote: > On Wed, Nov 13, 2002 at 10:04:59PM -0800, Adam McKenna wrote: > > > So I guess the question is which is the greater priority. Do we sacrifice > > the needs of our users in order to serve Free Software, or do we sacrifice > > (well, nothing) in order to serve our users? > > This is a gross mischaracterization of the argument. For one thing, the > social costs of maintaining non-free have already been presented at > length. However, the social cost of the alternatives, such as maintaining a more complicated contrib (or in the more extreme suggestions, even loosing contrib altogether, because how will dependencies be tracked if there will only be 'unofficial' random non-free .debs floating around on the net?), has not been presented clearly *at all*, and from following the discussion, I have the idea that they haven't been properly thought out either. When asked, John seems to have lots of random 'suggestions' about it, but I don't get the feeling that he cares much about the consequences either the developers, the debian project as a whole, or the users. It seems more a matter of principle and about trying to simplify things as an end in itself instead of a means to an end -- correct me if I'm wrong. IANADD(Y), but I personally feel that both users *and* Free Software are better served by either 1. keeping things as it is, or 2. concentrating on making Free alternatives to non-free packages more viable, as Branden suggested. The first option doesn't only serve the users better, it also does no harm to Free Software. People who consider everything they can apt-get "Free enough" are people who are somewhere half in the process of making the mental transition from the freeware/shareware/strangleware windows world to Free Software. Should we tell them to please use RedHat because we're not willing to let our precious bodily fluids be polluted by hosting non-truly-free software outside the main distribution? I don't think that'll help the advance of Free Software. Even while alternatives are getting better, there will always be special purpose software that nobody's willing to reimplement, and things like Qmail, which are free to distribute as source and modify via patches and thus for some people, free enough not to get worried morally. For some people even, non-free is free enough for DDs to maintain packages for. Those packages have higher value if they are made available alongside the Debian distribution. But that also applies vice versa. IMHO. Cheers, Emile. -- E-Advies / Emile van Bergen | emile@e-advies.info tel. +31 (0)70 3906153 | http://www.e-advies.info
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