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Re: non-free removal GR and our position to it ...



On Tue, Jan 13, 2004 at 01:50:27PM +0100, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 13, 2004 at 11:32:16AM +0100, Sylvain LE GALL wrote:
> > I can't understand the position about removing non-free. I was thinking
> > that it was in social contract. Removing non-free is non sense. I have
> > seen in debian-devel a thread about "top 5 things you want in debian".
> > All is about : mplayer, java... All non-free. To my mind, if we remove
> 
> No, last time I saw a dicussion about it, mplayer turned out to be free
> now (obvioiusly the same doesn't apply for codecs). Regarding java,
> there exists free implementation of it: gcj. Anyway this is not the
> point of the discussion.

I have more hope on kaffe personally. gcj is a byte like ocamlopt, while
kaffe is a virtual machine. and bytecode related stuff.

> > Last but not least : regarding the progress of GFDL issue, if we remove
> > non-free we will have a "100% documentation less" distribution. It is
> 
> This is not our problem, it's a GNU one, and is completely unrelated
> with the decision of dropping non-free. This decision should be taken
> for philosophical reasons, not for fears of loosing users. Anyway read
> below.
> 
> Now, my position. I haven't followed the discussion on debian-vote, but

Lucky you. It is over 800 mails right now.

> I'm totally in favour of dropping non-free out of debian. At the same
> time I'm also quite sure that this will change just a bit the amount of
> feature available to the final users.
> 
> The apt system is structured in such a way that you can use any
> repository you want. Splitting non-free out of debian will simply imply
> that debian machines wont host non-free packages anymore. We will
> probably see the creation of something like non-free-debian.org which
> will ship all those packages. All the users willing to use non-free
> packages will just have to add the relevant lines in their sources.list.

And what about the BTS, and other developer infrastructures ? 

And in particular, does that mean that we will drop ocaml-doc,
ocaml-books-en and ocaml-books-fr ?

> It's just a matter of standardizing a well-known repository of non-free
> packages and move it out of debian. Really.

Yeah, except the burden will be on the developers of non-free stuff,
which have more interesting things to do with their time.

Friendly,

Sven Luther



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