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Re: Free bigot flame burning, time to think.

After reading hundreds of messages, this one is uplifting.

1. I would rather see myself and others use Debian which is free.
2. Adding a non-free to Debian is much better than any alternative I can think of. It may be needed for business or other reasons. Most people who support Free software will look at this as a necessary compromise until a substitute is available.
For my own compromising reasons, I use Java 2 which means I have to point to a Blackdown mirror and the ones I've looked at seem to be broken at present time. This is bad from an administrators point of view and makes it harder to use Debian which is the easiest to maintain IMHO. 

The restrictions Osamu speaks of make sense as nobody wants to waste energy.
As a user and recommender of Debian and perhaps a future DD, I don't like the GR. 

Eric

Osamu Aoki wrote:


Hello,

I am afraid if current momentum of FREE software bigot pushes their
agenda, they may go further down to GR.  (It is sad for me to see some
of the respected DD of mine are on that camp.)

I believe "Free and GNU are good, bigot of any kind is bad."

Instead of telling people pushing GR to stop the GR path, those who
think otherwise might as well form summarized persuading reasons not to
adopt GR after the vote.  They may not win GR but there seems to be
enough out there to do GR.  (Discussion of the thread is getting too
large for the most people to follow.)

I will appreciate someone fluent in English and had some time with
Debian to take the lead in organizing counter arguments. (Including the
revision for the order of reasons).  Let me state my thought as below:

Reasons for not to expel non-free:

  (1)  size of non-free section has no practical impact to over all
       archive size (<<3%)  No real financial damage.
       See Susan's post Message-ID: <[🔎] 20021114103645.GA943@kleinmann.com>
  (2)  If this is done then contrib will increase with installer and
       real source and packages may be hosted in SF.NET or somewhere
       with some standardized packaging practice. Even less real change.
  (3)  If contrib is banned, then non-European Languages suffer awful X
       screen due to lack of fonts (CJK-font issue)  This is as bad
       situation as Netscape was allowed to be binary only.
  (4)  Many non-free are meant to be "Free" in the different context.
       Some trivial DSFG violation does not deserve to be that bad as
       long as there is a maintainer.  ("lha" is classified as non-free.
       I would say these can be free if we have money to hire reasonable
       lawyer to argue in court.  Some clause can be nullified due to
       its enforcement history. I saw some one wanted to drive APSFILTER
       to non-free recently.)
  (5)  We are not asking these non-free opposing people to maintain
       package.  So there is no resource issues.
  (6)  Flame war on this issue is waist of energy.  We will win
       non-free war by writing better free code (OpenSSH and GPG as good
       example).

I can live with some tighter restrictions:
  (a)  non-free with serious bug should be removed from unstable/testing
unless it is fixed in 1 year. (b) Orphaned package (more than a month or so.) shall be removed. (c) Threshold may be more than 3 DD to initiate new non-free package 
  (d)  No FTBFS if it contains source and in this condition for a year.
  .....
Oh, at the same time, I do not have problem putting similar restrictions 
on Free softwares.

Good luck.
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