Re: Software in main that is throughly useless without non-free software
On Mon, May 03, 1999 at 07:02:24PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
>
> James> When talking about common every day usage of a client like
> James> TiK; now using netcat as a server might sound c00l, 3l33t and
> James> funny on IRC, but how useful is it in real life? It's not.
>
> Who are you to judge how useful some program is to me? I have
> a couple of ldap clients, but no ldap server at the moment. I
> am looking at the internals. At some point, I shall look into
> connecting to a real server. I would resent anyone coming and
> telling me I can't do thAT.
As a software distrbution, we already do thousands of decisions how
useful software is for our users. We should not forget that we make a
distinction between importand, standard, optional and extra software. We
install some software by default.
We set preferences. We do this although there is no moral or ethical reason
to do so. We don't let heavily broken or damaging software into the
distribution (we have project/experimental for that, or we pull them before
release).
As a user, I have expectations. When I install a Debian package out of main,
I want to be able to use it in a free software cosmos.
Sure, there is some useful purpose even for broken software, or infunctional
software. For example, for debugging. Or for investigation ("looking at
internals"). But there is little point creating binary packages for that.
This is not a good argument for inclusion of such software.
Marcus
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