Re: A sensible plan for non-free
Option B.
Just remember that the idea is for online distribution to mimic current 3rd
party CD distribution. With 3rd party CDs we just provide a list of places
that you can order the CDs from. It is up to those vendors to make licensing
arrangements for non-free and it is up to them to determine how much they
charge for the CDs. We will now encourage a similar arrangement for
distributing non-free on-line.
This new category of on-line 3rd party distributors will provide users with an
apt-get source that provides transfers under whatever policies they prefer. A
school might act as a distributor to its students, a company to its employees
or a for-profit distributor to its subscribers. In any case, Debian itself
will not provide an anonymous transfer service to the general public for
non-free software.
The benefit is that we insure that "supported" non-free software is maintained
under our close supervision without actually distributing it ourselves. We do
not end up establishing some new organization that has an unclear
relationship to Debian. We mostly go on as we always have, except that we no
longer distribute non-free on-line to end users.
On Friday 12 March 2004 10:54, Marc Singer wrote:
> I can see two ways that this might be used. Either,
>
> A) non-free.debian.org becomes a round-robin of 3rd party archive servers
> that deliver all non-free packages, or
> B) users users of non-free may have to add archive entries for
> several different non-free servers.
>
> deb http://non-free.acme.org ./
> deb http://non-free.cogswell.org ./
>
> In the case of A, Debian still must retain storage for all of the
> non-packages, but users of non-free no longer get them from Debian
> servers. So we're enrolling a group of 3rd parties to pay some of the
> bandwidth costs.
>
> In B, we're putting the burden of locating non-free package source
> onto end users. In this case, I'm not sure why Debian is involved in
> non-free at all.
>
> I'm not getting where the win is. How does this plan change the
> status of non-free?
--
Ean Schuessler, CTO
Brainfood, Inc.
http://www.brainfood.com
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