Re: Hey! Why does everybody love flaming so much? [was: `pure']
>>>>> Manoj Srivastava writes:
MS> a) This is a lot of work, creating a new distribution,
Seeing as James Troup is one of the people who can do the work, I
don't see why this should bother you. Nobody's asking *you* to do any
work, Manoj, we're just discussing an idea.
MS> moving all but a few packages to this new distribution,
Who said anything about ``moving''? Why can't `pure' be a proper
subset of `main'.
MS> coordinating with mirrors,
It can all be done with symlinks into main. Then, every mirror that
wants pure will have to get `main', too, but not vice versa.
MS> expolaining to people what happened to gut main
Again, why should we have to ``gut main''?
MS> b) since holy and main shall both be part of Debian, this
MS> distinction is mostly meaningless. What does this distinction buy
MS> us, that we put in the kind of effort?
Who is the ``we'' you keep talking about? It seems to me that
maintaining `pure' can be done by just a few people, not necessarily
the Debian community as a whole. Even if the Debian Project votes
against the proposal (when it actually *is* proposed, after this
preliminary discussion we're having), there's nothing stopping me from
mirroring ftp.debian.org on, say, ftp.gnu.org, and adding a `pure'
distribution to that mirror.
Again, I'm not asking *you* to commit, only to stop fighting the
people who *want* to do the work.
I'd be just as upset at you if you told me that Debian GNU/Hurd is
pointless, and should be banned. It's work I care about, and if you
don't care about it, all I ask is that you don't get in my way.
MS> c) We decide on freeness based on the DFSG, which is purely
MS> licencing. I shall strongly resist junking the DFSG and putting
MS> in (IMHO) a poorere criteria for selecting packages based on
MS> things other than the licence.
There is no need to ``junk the DFSG.'' A separate, stricter
distribution does not mean that we need to change the contents of any
of the existing distributions.
Does that make you feel any better?
MS> d) Before we go any further, I would like to have explained to me
MS> how starting a free software foray in an proprietary protocol is
MS> harmful to the free software community
It's only harmful if it doesn't quickly result in a free server,
because it steals developers from equivalent but totally free
protocols. If one is implementing a client, what better way to test
it than to implement the server piece at the same time? That's a
helluva lot easier than trying to keep up with a protocol you don't
control (and that contains awful kludges you can do better with).
Without implying too much, since I don't know the situation very well,
I see a parallel in GNOME vs. KDE. If KDE had not depended on Qt,
there would only be one project, and they'd each be more than twice as
good as either one currently is.
It was not the KDE developers who made Qt free, it was the fact that
Trolltech realized they were quickly coming under fire from free
software activists, that GNOME was stealing mindshare from KDE, and
that they had no choice but to promise (not necessarily deliver) a
free Qt in order to stay in the picture.
Once the free Qt was promised, KDE solidly reestablished its lead. It
will keep it, if the free Qt is delivered in time (it may already have
been, for all I know).
In attempting to gain a six-month jump-start by using Qt, Matthias
Ettrich made a blunder that cost GNU over a year of work (all the
effort spent on GNOME and Harmony). Fortunately, there is still a
chance that work will be pulled out of the fire, if GNOME and KDE can
merge before they diverge too much to interoperate.
MS> e) Explain to me how having a free client implementation
MS> is any dofferent from the early days of GNU, when everyhing
MS> needed an non-free OS to run on.
This is a point worth addressing in a separate mail, so I'll do that.
--
Gordon Matzigkeit <gord@fig.org> //\ I'm a FIG (http://www.fig.org/)
Committed to freedom and diversity \// I use GNU (http://www.gnu.org/)
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