On Sat, Nov 16, 2002 at 10:00:54AM -0500, Tom Allison wrote:
> He speaks the truth.
> Removing non-free would probably cause some serious migration of
> users.
I'm not really sure where I stand on this whole issue (not that it
really matters), but why would people migrate? How much non-Free
software do you have installed? If you don't know, ask your friendly
Virtual RMS. I have a couple of w3c and IETF standard docs, some
non-Free fonts (which I don't even seem to be using at the moment), the
Blackdown JDK and the NVidia non-Free X drivers. If Debian was to drop
non-Free and I had to go download these myself, then I can't say I would
really care. I certainly would not care enough to switch away from
Debian. Do other distros even include things like IETF RFCs or the W3C
recommendations?
> While noble, don't let the idealistic goals supercede
> reasonable actions.
'idealistic goals' got Free Software where it is today. If RMS hadn't
got pissed about not being able to hack a printer driver at MIT, and GNU
had never started, where would we be? There'd be no Linux kernel,
there'd be no GCC, there'd be no massive Free Software movement, and
there'd be no Debian, full stop. Can you imagine a world without Emacs?
Even if the BSDs had been freed after the court case, they'd still have
the Obnoxious Advertising Clause (tm) and be annoying people to this
day. (Side note: GCC seems to the only 'real' Free ANSI C (not to
mention C++, Ada, Fortran, Pascal, Java, Objective C, et al) compiler
out there. How would the BSDs have fared without it?)
I guess my point is that the world needs both pragmatists and idealists,
but without the idealists the {Free Software,computer,} world will never
improve.
-rob
p.s. Settle down on the CC's. There's already a huge discussion on d-d
about it, they don't need more noise from people who ain't going to vote
anyhow. Also, I'm fairly sure secretary@debian.org is quite
well-informed on these issues already :)
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