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.
> 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
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.
It's just a matter of standardizing a well-known repository of non-free
packages and move it out of debian. Really.
The only precious suggestion I have to give to people carrying on this
idea is to _first_ standardize such a repository out of debian and
_then_ split non-free.
Cheers.
--
^Stefano Zacchiroli - Computer Science PhD student @ Uny Bologna, Italy$
^zack@{cs.unibo.it,debian.org,bononia.it} -- http://www.bononia.it/zack$
^Frequentando il mio maestro mi ero reso conto [.] che la logica poteva$
^servire a molto a condizione di entrarci dentro e poi di uscirne -Adso$
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