Re: The proposed GR: catch-22
On Wed, Jun 07, 2000 at 09:06:41PM -0400, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:
> Chris Lawrence <lawrencc@debian.org> writes:
>
> > 1. It will have minimal effects since people will still be able to use
> > non-free software.
> >
> > 2. It will have far-reaching effects since Debian (the corporate
> > entity) will expend fewer resources in support of people wanting to
> > use non-free software.
>
> I'm somenoe who has made these points, or something like them, but I
> think they are both mispresented in order to make them look
> contradictory.
>
> The correct version of 1 is:
>
> 1) It cause minimal disruption of users since people will still find
> it as easy to use non-free software if they want.
And how/where will they find it? Not as easy as adding "non-free" to
the end of their apt/sources.list lines.
> The correct version of 2 is:
>
> 2) It will have important effects on Debian, because we will maintain
> our actual focus, devoting our resources to Debian.
???
What do you mean? What are "our resources" and how is this proposal
going to change matters? The developers maintaining non-free are
hardly likely to stop just because their packages are now going to
live elsewhere. Don't tell me that the <1GB of non-free is the issue,
'cos that's all donated anyway, and I do not believe that the marginal
costs of administering non-free are significant.
> non-free is not part of Debian, so why are we distributing it? For
> the convenience of the users. If it were not for that, we would never
> consider it. Since we can meet the convenience of the users in a way
> which does not require weakening the principles upon which Debian was
> founded. we should do it.
And how, exactly, would that work?
Do you have any idea how many complaints I heard when Debian only
changed its internal archive structure a couple of releases ago? How
many lusers couldn't figure it out?
Get real!
Julian
--
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Julian Gilbey, Dept of Maths, QMW, Univ. of London. J.D.Gilbey@qmw.ac.uk
Debian GNU/Linux Developer, see http://www.debian.org/~jdg
Donate free food to the world's hungry: see http://www.thehungersite.com/
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