Re: How free is Debian
On Thu 08/Aug/2019 13:50:40 +0200 John Hasler wrote:
> tomas writes:
>> This is one of those cases: if you're using a piece of non-free
>> software, you should know about it, and you should know which buy
>> decision led to it (so you can take that into account at your next buy
>> decision).
>
> There is also a practical reason to keep non-free for the benefit of
> downstream distributions, CD makers, etc. Some of the licenses on stuff
> in non-free make it ok for Debian to distribute the stuff but attempt to
> place restrictions on what recipients can do with it. As long as you
> stick to Main you need only read the DFSG to know what your
> redistribution rights are. As soon as you go into Non-free you have to
> study each license.
>
> This can even hit end-users. Non-free licenses can contain clauses
> barring "commercial use" (without defining the term) and other similar
> restrictions. This package is not in Debian, but I recall a "free" text
> editor that was distributed on the Net back in the last century that
> barred use by the South African police. It would have qualified for
> inclusion in Non-free.
Perhaps we'd need an Almost-free, or Semantically-free category in
order to distinguish blind redistributablity from actual
devil-may-be-here stuff. I'm thinking GNU doc in particular...
Best
Ale
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