Re: Negative Summary of the Split Proposal
Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:
> If I were certain that what we are discussing here is just moving the
> archives to another box and making apt not use the non-free archive by
> default, I have no problem with it. As long as there is still mention
> someplace that is not hard to find if you're looking for it, I have no
> problem with it because a reasonable person would figure out that they
> needed to look.
>
> What I would like is a way we culd distribute Debian while probably
> not telling users about non-free packages. There may be some overlap
> between that and what you have said you would accept.
Why do you want to pretend that there is no non-free?
I think you are doing yourself a disservice here. Unless the user is
aware of the problems of software licensing, he will never know what
GNU/Linux is all about. This means you have to educate him about free
software and not hide some information from the user (well, AFAIK you
tell everybody all the time what makes the difference between non-free
and free software). If a user wants to use non-free packages, why
should the information on how to get them be hided?
I don't see a point in making it difficult to get non-free packages.
You want newbies to cross the border to free software completely or not
at all. Why don't you want to have a smooth, an educated transition?
In addition I view our non-free, as something in between what I
call "evil" and "good". You are free to move "evil" to the left if you
want to in my drawing... ;-)
free propietary
"good" "evil"
+-+-----------------------+---------------------+
| core Debian non-free NDAs
| of debian
GNU philosophy
I think we draw a clear line separating non-free from free:
It is certain you can take an official Debian CD set and
say that there is no non-free Software on it. Is this not enough?
> For example, I think that a comment in an apt configuration file is
> not a big issue, assuming most users won't see the comment, because
> they just use apt rather than looking directly at its configuration
> file.
Come on, are users that stupid? Currently, as I recall from my last
install of Debian, you even have to edit apt's configuration file to
get non-free packages, so what is the point in
adding a new line to /etc/apt/sources.list or adding the phrase
"non-free" to a line in it?
Jens
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---
Jens.Ritter@weh.rwth-aachen.de grimaldi@debian.org
Key ID: 2048/E451C639 Jens Ritter
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