On Fri, Nov 15, 2002 at 02:18:16PM +0000, Steven Fuerst wrote: > I am the upstream maintainer of Zangband (which is also in non-free due > to the same technicality that angband has.) > > I'd like to see Zangband, Angband, and Moria still be apt-gettable. You do realize that "apt-gettability" is totally orthogonal to the existence or contents of the Debian mirror network, right? > I use debian, and have over the past three years - but I really can't > see how removing these essentially open-source projects from debian > helps in any way. I don't see what being "essentially open-source" has to do with anything. A license as applied to a specific package is either DFSG-free or it is not. > I am already attempting to rewrite most of the Zangband source so that > the license can be changed to GPL - but forceably removing it from my > distribution because I can't code fast enough makes me angry. Packages get removed even from main before their mantainers are ready for them to be; witness the recent "round of removals" messages from the Release Manager. Being a Debian Developer doesn't mean you have the right to keep your packages in the distribution under all circumstances. This fact applies to main, non-free, anything. > Robert Ruhlmann (the 'upstream' maintainer of Angband) has already > changed distributions from Debian to Gentoo due to silliness like > this. I can see myself following One cannot please all of the people all of the time. I also do not see what purpose extortionist threats serve; it would be better if you departed the Project in an act of conscience rather than vengeance. > if this project heads towards the direction of idealism, instead of > facing reality and realising that some open source code happens to > predate the debian mission statement. I have not seen anyone assert or imply that there is code that does not predate the Debian Social Contract or Debian Free Software Guidelines. Certainly it would be difficult for those who participated in the original discussion of these documents on the debian-private mailing list in June and July of 1997 to plausibly make such an assertion, so presumably they are aware of it. > The debian project has to realise it has users and upstream maintainers > as well as the people who create packages. Your GR totally ignores this > fact. This appears to me to be a non sequitur. I do not see how John's proposed General Resolution ignores users or upstream maintainers in any way. -- G. Branden Robinson | There's nothing an agnostic can't Debian GNU/Linux | do if he doesn't know whether he branden@debian.org | believes in it or not. http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | -- Graham Chapman
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