Re: Notice: GR to remove non-free support from Debian
Syrus Nemat-Nasser <syrus@shiba.ucsd.edu> wrote:
>On 8 Jun 2000, Chuan-kai Lin wrote:
>> There is a General Resolution proposed by developer John Goerzen that
>> is under discussion on both debian-devel and debian-project, maybe also
>> a few others that I am not aware of. The nature of the GR is to amend
>> the Social Contract so that Debian will stop distributing non-free
>> packages. If the GR is passed, then Debian will no longer provide the
>> storage, bandwidth, and bug tracking facilities for non-free packages,
>> including acroread, blender, netscape, jdk, povray, trn, and xanim.
>
>This may be a good time to transition support for the non-free packages to
>an organization outside Debian. I imagine that a number of companies would
>jump at the chance to host the bug tracking system for Debian non-free.
I sincerely hope we don't have to do this. Regardless of your feelings
about non-free, it's still hosted in a non-commercial way at the moment.
If a company decided to host it, I'd always have a niggling fear at the
back of my mind saying "What if they wanted to charge a 'nominal fee'
for the 'service' of letting me download from non-free?". The GPL would
let them do this, for one.
I would much prefer if some Debian developers got together and hosted a
non-free archive, in the (IMHO unpleasant) situation where this became
necessary. There has been talk of this; I hope it won't come to that,
because it's still more difficult for users to find, it's a waste of
resources, and concentrating on linking its quality to that of Debian's
would be doubly hard.
>Think about this: With the distribution of tools such as Borland's Kylix,
>there may soon be a flood of non-free Linux applications. Many of these
>may use a shareware or demo-ware distribution strategy to maximize
>exposure. Also, with Debian and Debian-derived distributions becoming more
>popular, there should be Debianized versions of most commercial offerings.
Even a separate non-free archive couldn't distribute those; at present
non-free can include pretty much anything that *can* be distributed
freely. If commercial software companies want to distribute Debian
packages of their programs for a fee, they're still going to have to do
it themselves.
--
Colin Watson [cjw44@flatline.org.uk]
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