On Wed, Nov 13, 2002 at 01:53:23AM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote: > Anyway, one thing will definitely be the case: if this GR passes, testing > won't support non-free, which means updates to software in main that > break non-free software won't be held back, which will probably make > life difficult occassionally. It might also make contrib a lot harder to > manage if it's kept, since dependencies on non-free components (which > is what contrib is for after all) will never be satisfiable as far as > testing's concerned, and those packages will never be promoted to testing. This changes the discussion radically. People have been saying that users who want to use non free software on debian can, they just have to download it somewhere. Since testing will no longer be testing non-free software, we won't know about a change to one of our core components until a user tries a testing (or a stable) version of debian with their piece of non-free software and tells us that its broken. So, in effect, we could possibly lose all users who need any non-free software, because someone who needs non-free in order to use their machine[1] won't wait around until we've fixed the software that their software depends on. Of course, this also changes the discussion to "let's remove non-free and contrib" even though things in contrib are free, by the definition of contrib. This in effect reduces the likelihood that people will want to develop free alternatives for the software that their contrib software depends on. i.e. limewire[2] depends on Java2. Since limewire is in contrib, maybe debian users of limewire will be more inclined to work on a free Java2 replacement. Also, some people have said in this thread that we should "help our users kick the habit" of using non-free software. I don't think that is an attitude which promotes freedom. I don't want to help/force anyone kick any habits. [1] As in the case of the blind person who said they need non-free speech systhesis software [2] I'm the maintainer of limewire -- michael cardenas | lead software engineer, lindows.com hyperpoem.net | GNU/Linux software developer people.debian.org/~mbc | encrypted email preferred "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free... it expects what never was and never will be." - Thomas Jefferson
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