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Re: non-free but distributable packages and kernel firmware



Floris Bruynooghe wrote:
On Sat, Apr 09, 2005 at 01:17:02AM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
I wonder if it would be worth considering a "fsf-free" component that offers a Packages file listing packages from non-free with the fsf-free tag.
Personally I would like that.  But making a separate Packages file for
fsf-free raises other questions.  Suppose one of the packages with
fsf-free has a dependency on other non-free packages?

I imagine that'd be a bug -- surely the FSF wouldn't consider a package to be free if it depended on something they didn't consider free?

How handle that?

Same way we do for packages in main that depend on other things? Fix it, or move (untag) it?

Would it require a sub policy that fsf-free can only depend on
contib, main and other fsf-free tagged non-free packages?

It'd be more "Packages can only be tagged fsf-free if the only reason they're in non-free is because of content under the GFDL, AGPL, ..., and they don't depend on anything that's not in main or that isn't also tagged fsf-free", I think.

fsf-free stuff couldn't depend on stuff in contrib for the same reason stuff in main can't -- indirect dependency on non-free.

But this
will end up with a hunge, hard-to-maintain hierarchy of non-free tags
of who's allowed to depend on who.

I don't think anything other than fsf-free would need dependencies enforced; the others all strike me as being advisory -- after all, in *your* specific circumstances, you might be happy to abide by the non-free license; the DFSG-free and FSF-free classes are the only ones that're likely to be worth treating as absolute or "I don't want to even know anything else exists" categories.

Ok, this would be kind of wierd as mostly GFDL would fit in it, but
technically nothing stops it from happening.

The Affero GPL, and potentially GPLv3 make it more plausible.

I'm more advocating against a separate Packages file here then for the
added complexity.

I suspect there're a few curmudgeons around who'd rather go with the FSF's idea of freedom than ours; I think they're probably worth supporting explicitly.

Cheers,
aj



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