On Thu, Mar 25, 1999 at 07:39:19PM +0100, Richard Braakman wrote:
> Yet he is remarkably successful in all this forcing and cramming,
> particularly given his lack of means of coercion. I think it is
> more likely that there is actually a large group of people who
> agree with him. How do you think Lintian came to be distributed
> under the GPL? RMS certainly didn't tell us to.
I think a very large number of people place software under the GPL
because they believe it's the standard license for Free Software and that
they are told the other licenses are "bad" (and in some cases I would
agree) and that the GPL is good. I am almost frightened by the number of
people who have never READ the GPL and yet they release code under it...
> > He has already proposed on more than one occasion that Debian get rid of
> > the nasty (in his mind) point on our social contract to support people
> > who use non-free software and has taken steps to cause us to all but
> > delete the contrib and non-free portions of our archive in potato. It's
> > about time someone stood up and pushed for just a little bit of realism
> > here.
>
> Cites, please. I have never seen him propose this, and I have seen
> none of these steps. You are misrepresenting him.
It was a mistake to bring this up here. My apologies, the cites would
almost exclusively be references to -private messages, though the results
of them have been discussed elsewhere.
I can immediately name two such "suggestions" which have been discussed
on -devel after the original message on -private so I will cite them.
The suggestion that Debian stop distributing contrib and non-free on our
ftp sites or create a new site to distributed Debian without them was
his.
He's also the person who had the problem with the longstanding allowance
of suggests into contrib/non-free for packages which he took as Debian's
ringing endorsement of non-free software rather than the simple
suggestion it was. (And yet his "suggestions" are just that, simple
suggestions right---even though he holds over us that he'll tell people
that we're NOT in fact a free distribution unless we do as he wishes..)
--
Joseph Carter <knghtbrd@debian.org> Debian GNU/Linux developer
PGP: E8D68481E3A8BB77 8EE22996C9445FBE The Source Comes First!
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<dark> Culus: Building a five-meter-high replica of the Empire State
Building with paperclips is impressive. Doing it blindfolded is
eleet.
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