non-free: newbie perspective

[Sean Proctor <sproctor@ccs.neu.edu>]

The argument about non-free whithering of its own accord seems illogical to me.  There will always be non-free software without a free equivalent.  I don't think that this says anything about whether debian should be distributing non-free software or not.  Needs of the times change and there will always be needs, perhaps rare, that will not have free software to fulfill them.

I think perhaps before going through with this GR, it should be decided what non-free software is/was deemed necessary.  (If this is already documented somewhere, please excuse my ignorance.)  I'm a newbie, as I said, but I'm going to guess this line would be drawn around "software that a lot of people need to have productive systems".  I know without ssh and a web browser, my computer would be a lot less useful.

Does there still exist packages in non-free that more than 10% of debian users have installed?  And if so, are those integral parts of their systems?  It's not like removing these packages from debian mirrors will suddenly make them unavailable.  Users can still go to $SOME_SITE and download them (presumably).  If a user doesn't know enough about a piece of software to be able to find and download it, it's probably not that vital to them.

There's lots of talk about chasing users away or not providing some service they want.  A lot of systems exist to provide non-free solutions at no cost.  I don't think Debian should strive to retain users who would be better servered by these other systems.  Personally, I think Debian serves a different niche than any other OS.  If someone doesn't care about whether or not they're using free software, then they may do switch, and I don't think that would be a detriment to Debian.  If a user wants to use/support an OS that only supports free software, right now they're out of luck (as far as I know.  there's probably a few small distributions that only support free software, but I think this is not the issue).  Debian is probably the closest to this criteria, but still has a non-free section.

Regards,
Sean