On Sun, 2002-11-17 at 00:50, Rob Weir wrote:
> 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 :)
My outlook largely is coincident with Rob on this one - my vrms listing
mentions primarily RFCs and W3C recommendations, typefaces, a few
compressors/decompressors, and one that I think needs to be re-licensed
before anything like this happens:
tdlug The Debian Linux User's Guide online book
For that matter, I also have:
lasg Linux Administrator's Security Guide
ldp-nag HTML, PS and ASCII version of Network
Administrators'
ldp-tlk HTML and PS version of Linux Kernel Guide.
each of which vrms picks up as non-free. While I'm not crazy about the
GNU FDL, and would only use it on any documentation I prepare if I could
add one codicil[1], I don't think that it looks all that good for such
key documentation to be excluded from any distribution. While Debian is
*very close* to being able to walk away from non-free in comparison to
other distributions, this is currently a stumbling block.
[1] Changes meant to improve clarity and accuracy could be made under
the original title, so long as they were documented in a changelog
Appendix - I personally don't like that nothing in the GNU FDL prevents
some "micro $oft-ware" company or virus hacker from issuing totally
inaccurate and potentially damaging editions of documentation as GNU FDL
revised documents - my codicil wouldn't prevent that, but it would
permit the safe and constructive revisions under the original title.
--
Mark L. Kahnt, FLMI/M, ALHC, HIA, AIAA, ACS, MHP
ML Kahnt New Markets Consulting
Tel: (613) 531-8684 / (613) 539-0935
Email: kahnt@hosehead.dyndns.org
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