Re: non-free software
King Lee <king@ultrix6.cs.csubak.edu> writes:
> I have just installed debian from cdrom (infomagic),
> and some of my favorite packages, available
> on Red Hat, are missing from the Debian
> distribution. These packages (netpbm , xv) are in the non-free
> subdirectory of packages in www.debian.org, but in the distributions
> available on cdroms ( I checked other cdroms).
>
> I understand there may be restrictions on distributions of some
> packages, but if others can include it why cannot Debian? Debian
> seems to have the larger of packages than other distributions
> but they are missing some rather basic packages?
This illustrates a point I was planing to bring up for discussion
on debian-devel. The Debian Social Contract, referring to the contrib
and non-free, says "We encourage CD manufacturers to read the licenses
of software packages in these directories and determine if they can
distribute that software on their CDs.
Prior to the "Official CD", some vendors, such as CheapBytes,
included substantial parts of non-free on their CDs while others,
including Infomagic, ignored non-free. Since we made the "Official
CD" available with the bo release, all CD vendors seem to have taken
the path of least resistance, and reproduced the "Official CD" as is.
The "Official CD" is a Good Thing (TM), but this side effect is a
Bad Thing (TM). I would like to see someone come up with a way to
persuade vendors to include as much of non-free as possible, while
still issuing the "Official CD". One possibility is to include the
non-free directory in the "Official CD" image, and point the vendors
to a statement similar to that in the Social Contract.
Bob
--
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|_) _ |_ Robert D. Hilliard <hilliard@metrolink.net>
|_) (_) |_) Palm City, FL USA PGP Key ID: A8E40EB9
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