Re: Commercial .debs
There are at least two possible ways in which commercial organizations
might release .debs: (1) via non-free on the debian distribution sites,
and (2) by putting the .debs on their commercial CDs and/or their own
web sites. Obviously, the debian project can exercise some control over
the former, but would have no direct control over the latter.
Also, it seems to me that it would be adviseable for the packager of a
commercial .deb to be a debian developer -- either a developer who is
already on the project for other reasons who acts as maintainer for the
commercial package, or a developer from the commercial organization who
joins the project for the limited purpose of maintaining the commercial
.deb. Note that in the second case, it would probably be adviseable to
have a low-traffic mailing list for commercial package maintainers --
it might not be attractive to the commercial organization to accept
the overhead of one of their on-staff developers spending paid time
tracking debian-devel.
It would probably be a good idea to place some words of guidance the
subject of on making .debs of commercial packages on the debian website,
probably along with a pointer to a specific contact person on the project.
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