Re: A sensible plan for non-free

[Evan Prodromou <evan@debian.org>]

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>>>>> "e" == ean  <ean@brainfood.com> writes:

    e> The alternative, apparently, will be some sort of external
    e> organization that deals with non-free. Inevitably we will have
    e> to come to terms with such an organization and draft policy for
    e> dealing with it's packages and inevitably other such
    e> organizations will start and we'll be stuck with a whole new
    e> mess of administrative headaches. That sucks.

Why is that necessary? I agree that the demand seems to be there to
bring together Debian add-on packages for non-free software, and I
think when/if Debian drops non-free, some other individuals or
organizations will pick up the slack.

But I don't think Debian has any reason to "bless" any one such group,
nor to make any special accommodations with that org. I don't see any
advantage to users, nor to us.

Technically we have a great package management system that makes
it easy and convenient to track packages from any number of
sources. Users can easily decide where they want to get their non-free
packages, drop in a sources.list line, and then forget it.

So, users who want non-free packages are covered. They plug into
Debian easily. They don't get the rest of Debian infrastructure (QA,
BTS, mirror network, developer community, yadda yadda), but that's the
whole point of removing non-free. If there's a demand for it, someone
will set up these things, too.

~ESP

- -- 
Evan Prodromou
evan@debian.org
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