Re: Possibly moving Debian services to a CDN
On Wed, November 20, 2013 19:03, anarcat wrote
>>> And saying that "because there's proprietary firmware in your BIOS it's
>>> okay to offload all of Debian's infrastructure to a non-free CDN is
>>> okay"
>>> seems to me to be a slippery slope.
>>
>> Nobody has talked about moving all of Debian's infrastructure.
>
> Okay, "some". The argument remains: it's still a slippery slope argument.
> :)
The slippery slope argument is often considered a logical fallacy and not
without reason. The argument implies that by making choice A we would
automatically not be stopping to make the 'worse' choice B, while Debian
at any and all moments keeps the freedom to do A and not B.
> I see your point, although I think there is a few orders of magnitudes
> between adding improvements to the current mirror infrastructures versus
> soldering PCBs...
Debian's core activity is building the best OS in the world. Distributing
the actual result of that is, at least in my opinion, a thing very
peripheral to that activity. The fact that Debian has always shied away
from making CD's and distrbuting those to users but rather left that to
commercial and non-commercial parties, indicates that this is not a novel
development.
We allow (and promoted) commercial CD services. I see delivery over the
network not as a fundamentally different thing than delivery on CD. It's
not the thing Debian is necessarily good at. Let us concentrate on the OS
building.
> which are based on a spirit of free access and open knowledge, something
> commercial CDNs seem to be alien to...
I have not seen any indication that commercial CDN's would necessarily be
"alien" to "free access and open knowledge", in fact, it would seem rather
contrary to their nature to hinder access to content.
Thijs
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