Re: On the lets-remove-nonfree-proposal
Hamish> > 2. Introduce people to open source ideals.
Marcus> Debian was founded long before the Open Source movement hit the
Marcus> market.
Marek> I think Hamish referred to the idea of open source, not to the
Marek> Movement.
Obviously. Marcus "accidentally" (?) overlooked the small caps. These
repeated "accidents" by the GR proponents are getting old real fast.
>> Personally, I value freedom over quality and convenience, and would hope
>> that Debian promotes it this way.
Marek> Marcus, I think that this statement expresses the feelings of all of
Marek> us here - no matter whether we are pro or contra the GR. But that is
Marek> not the point - these are our personal feelings _not_ related to the
Marek> project as a whole and, more, not related to the feelings of our
Marek> _users_. And, I think, that is the the starting point of the entire
Marek> flamewar (err.. discussion?) - that some of us try to promote their
Marek> own (our own) ideals/feeling without regard to what the _users_ as a
Marek> community need/demand/seek in Debian. What they want is a fully
Marek> functional OS with all the features found in the other OSes out
Marek> there. More, they turn to Debian because they seek quality and they
Marek> find it, they seek exellency and they find it, but as soon as they
Marek> are faced with the fact that Debian, as an OS, doesn't contain some
Marek> pieces of software because the software isn't free in the Debian
Marek> terms, they will turn to look somewhere else. This all have been
Marek> said before, therefore I'll just stop now... The bottom line for
Marek> today is that the free software has still some way ahead before it
Marek> can replace all the non-free software in a fully functional OS.
Marek>
>> Free software is not necessarily of higher quality, there is a lot of
>> bad software around, free or proprietary. It is good to see that free
>> software can be of higher quality, but it is not a direct consequence.
Marek> I agree completely but, again, this is your, mine, our personal view
Marek> - not necessarily (and probably, in many cases, _not_) of our
Marek> users. As Hamish put it in his mail - we want to educate users about
Marek> free software and its ideals - therefore we must attract the users
Marek> and not push them away by _not providing them with the software they
Marek> need_. Before somebody gets in and states that I'm promoting
Marek> non-free software - I just recognize the fact that not all non-free
Marek> software has its free, fully functional and equally good free
Marek> counterparts. IMO this very fact is a reason to work more and harder
Marek> on providing the missing free equivalents...
Marek>
>> > However, I think this GR compromises #2. [...] > We lose our
>> opportunity > to show them the benefits of open source (goal #2).
>>
>> I think that the benefits of free software is that it is free,
Marek> That's an ideological and valuable benefit but without a direct
Marek> benefit for an end user...
Marek>
>> not that it allows to run netscape on it or any other technical
>> argument. We currently don't take our opportunity to show this to our
>> users.
Marek> Oh, but we do! People who work on Mozilla do exactly that! As soon
Marek> as their product (or, say, galeon) is finished they will step
Marek> forward and say "There! Here's a _free_ equivalent of Netscape -
Marek> see? It has all the features of Netscape and even more, and is
Marek> free!". By doing that they will show that the free software _is_
Marek> better - and it will be clear for everyone. That's what should be
Marek> done - demonstrating the superiority of free software by facts, not
Marek> by speeches, statements and impractical resolutions.
Marek>
Marek> regards,
Marek>
Marek> marek
Marek>
--
According to the latest figures, 43% of all statistics are totally worthless.
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