Re: Negative Summary of the Split Proposal
On Jul 03, Raul Miller wrote:
> However, since it is, would people please try to think through what
> they're saying? [For example, if I agreed with Chris's line of thought
> then I'd believe that Debian is brainwashing people by failing to offer
> them all the standard Red Hat software.]
Did you read my post?
We would be brainwashing people (by my definition) if and only if:
1. We offered Red Hat and Debian packages.
2. We said "We support the use of Red Hat packages, even though we do
not consider them part of the official distribution" in our social
contract.
3. We said "You have a choice whether you use Red Hat or Debian
packages."
4. We go out of our way to ensure people never face the choice they
supposedly have. (Perhaps we bury some obscure config option in
/etc/apt/sources.list, instead of asking in dinstall or apt's
postinst "Would you like to use Debian or Red Hat packages?")
We don't offer Red Hat packages (step 1), so I'm not seeing how I
could be saying we're brainwashing people by not giving people the
choice of using them (step 4). Feel free to code up a universal
apt-alien interface to prove me wrong :p
We do offer non-free packages. So the question is, do we offer that
choice directly or do we hide it from people? RMS seems to prefer the
latter option (lest any of our apparently stupid users accidentally
choose "wrongly").
This question is directly tied-up in this vote. It's all about
whether we facilitate the use of non-free software until this Free
Software Utopia (complete with welfare for programmers) comes about.
Chris
--
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| Chris Lawrence | Get your Debian 2.1 CD-ROMs |
| <quango@watervalley.net> | http://www.lordsutch.com/ |
| | |
| Grad Student, Pol. Sci. | Visit the Amiga Web Directory |
| University of Mississippi | http://www.cucug.org/amiga.html |
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