On 3/5/07, Michael Koch <konqueror@gmx.de> wrote:
[...]
I understand your point of view and respect it. But as we are
responsible in some way of the software we package and distribute, we
cannot distribute a software for Debian that could install non free
software in all ~'s.
Binary blobs are not non-free per so. If we would go your route we would
have to disable download functionality in e.g. iceweasel as you are
*able* to download non-free stuff with it. The download feature in Maven
is no problem per se. We just need to figure out how we exactly handle
non-installed dependencies.
How was it build? What are the build/runtime dependencies? These sort
of things will be a headache. Example: Hibernate have a dependency
with transaction api you have to download to Sun website; Spring,
Maven have dependencies against javamail, activation you have to
download from Sun's website. And for the last two one, we have free
implementations. Are these implementations in the maven repository so
the user could use the free implementation or is (s)he obliged to use
the Maven proprietary one?
Tom Marble told me he'll work on that issue where a lot of Sun's
libraries must be downloaded from Sun website with a click on the
agreement, no source to build them and a non-free license (Sun
binary...), but in the mean time, what do we do?