Re: Why Anthony Towns is wrong
On Mon, Mar 08, 2004 at 09:31:40PM -0800, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:
> Sven Luther <sven.luther@wanadoo.fr> writes:
>
> > You aim for it to no longer be supported on officialy visible debian
> > ressource, the fact that this will probably be the same DD volunteer
> > time going in maintaining the supposed non-free.org infrastructure, make
> > this a fiction, and a non-efficient one in the long run.
>
> I don't make any claims on the time of Debian developers. They can
> spend that time or not. Many Debian developers already maintain
> separate apt-get repositories. The BTS is a help, but not the only
> way to manage bug reports.
Yeah, but just because you say something, it is not necessarily reality.
> In my opinion, non-free software is not part of Debian. Time spent
> maintaining it is *already* time taken away from Debian.
Which is why it is best to minimize said time.
> > I do believe that the presence of a recognized and legimitized
> > non-free.org will be counter productive to this effort, so we clearly
> > disagree. LEt's have this discussion again a few years from now, only
> > time will tell which of us was right. (Probably none or both will be
> > though, which is why i think removing non-free should be done on a
> > package by package basis).
>
> Do you believe that only the maintainer should judge the case? Would
> you agree to some set of standards to avoid having non-free packages
> which are unnecessary, but which the maintainer for whatever reason
> likes?
Naturally i would. The maintainer has the best interaction with
upstream, and is the best to judge over both the possibility of upstream
freeing the licence and the reality of free replacement, but i know that
some maintainers can be stubborn on those issues, but i guess the
technical commitee has already the power to override them on this.
And naturally, it seems that most maintainers of non-free stuff are MIA
anyway, or don't care about the packages.
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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