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Re: RFD: amendment of Debian Social Contract



[digression; nothing about voting or the current GR here, just a
question about the real reasons that non-free is languishing today.]

On Wed, Nov 05, 2003 at 05:23:43PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:

> Second, our users still aren't able to do everything they might like
> to with free software; they can't play Flash games, they can't look
> at Quicktime movies, they can't do internet banking with Java clients,
> and they can't do a bunch of other things. Some of those things can be
> ameliorated with non-free, although fewer are than is possible since
> non-free hasn't been being maintained at the level it ought to be.

Which of the lacunae on your list can be remedied with non-free software
that we would actually be able to redistribute?  I don't think the
absence of Java browser plugins from non-free is really due to a lack of
interest -- last I checked, Blackdown was working through the legal tape
to be able to let us redistribute their jre in non-free, but this has
never come to fruition.

I think it's ridiculous that no one in the Mozilla community has ever
managed to implement a Java plugin for use with any of the myriad free
JVMs, but that's another matter.  Or maybe it isn't, since my own
background leaves me much more inclined to work on free
reimplementations of the missing software than to package the non-free
ones.

-- 
Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer

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