Re: Non-Free Software

[Peter Prohaska <reax@polyx.muc.de>]

On Tue, Mar 31, 1998 at 03:43:42PM -0700, Bob Nielsen wrote:
> On Tue, 31 Mar 1998, King Lee wrote:
> 
> > I want Linux to become a viable alternative to Microsoft, not
> > because I hate Microsoft, but because Linux is better in many
> > circumstances. I would like corporate information technology
> > managers to use Linux for mail servers, print servers, and
> > whatever else Linux is better at.  The problem is that managers
> > are unfamilar with Linux.  They may be willing to 
> > run dselect, but one cannot expect them to search the net
> > for a package, download it, and run "dpkg -i file".
> 
> dselect will do this also (ftp method).  deity/apt (or whatever is the
> name du jour) will do it more slickly.

I think one and even a more important problem than managers are privat
users. As today, also "normal" home users can manage to run a Linux system
with an acceptable amount of work, there are more and more ones that want
to test it. So, for instance quite a lot of my friends are very happy, using
Linux. But in fact, nearly no one has such good connectivity that it's fun
using the ftp-method for installing packages and phone costs are high as well.
Another thing is, that you can pass a CD round easiely, but not evryone
has the equipment, to share downloaded files without bigger efforts.
So in my opinion, it is important to have non-free on CDs.

The idea of keeping up a list of files from non-free which can be burnt on CD
without hesitating would be a very good thing.
It might be just a directory with symlinks to packages in non-free.
So there would not be too much to change.
Sure, it is a lot of work, but if you want to make a debian archive out of a
program, you have to read the License anyway. So adding a symlink should be
an acceptable effort, not?
If you want to distribute debian, and have to go through every licence
in non-free... wouldn't you drop non-free?

peter.


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