On Fri, Nov 15, 2002 at 01:11:42AM +0100, Rémi Letot wrote: > So stop adding new non-free, but don't render access to existing used > non-free more difficult just for the sake of it. No one, as far as I can tell, is proposing that we make users' access to non-free more difficult "just for the sake of it". Rationales that have been proposed include: 1) Increasing the chances that our users, and other people, understand that non-free software *is not part of the Debian system*. 2) Increasing the Debian Project's focus on Free Software, instead of packaging and distributing everything we legally can. > When there really are free alternatives to every non-free, noone will > use non-free, Why should they switch if what they already have works well enough for them? > or at least no DD will maintain it. What do you mean by "maintain"? Really maintain, or just have one's name on the package? We have a lot of developers who nominally maintain packages but in practice do precious little with them. Even Essential packages have suffered from this problem. Read the changelog of "debianutils" sometime. (Clint Adams recently solved this specific problem.) If we wait for Debian Developers to decide they no longer want to maintain non-free software, we may be waiting forever. > When that comes, non-free can disappear. You provide no credible arguments that this will actually happen. It sounds like a lot of people are taking the success of Free Software over its non-free rivals on faith. I disagree. I think Free Software will only succeed if we work on it. -- G. Branden Robinson | It's like I have a shotgun in my Debian GNU/Linux | mouth, I've got my finger on the branden@debian.org | trigger, and I like the taste of http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | the gunmetal. -- Robert Downey, Jr.
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